


build a ladder to the stars

by redbelles



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Author has way too many feelings about the Millennium Falcon, Dreams, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghosts, Gray Jedi, Hurt/Comfort, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Force Ships It, The Force as Eldritch Horror, Touch-Starved, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-03-18 20:49:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 42,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13689540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redbelles/pseuds/redbelles
Summary: Kylo Ren's heart is a desert.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NextToSomething](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NextToSomething/gifts).



The _Millennium Falcon_ was many things—piece of junk, more than she looks, ship out of legend—but at heart she was a freighter. 

The YT-1300s were built to haul cargo, not people, even before someone sacrificed most of the seats and all of the nonessential wall paneling in the name of weight reduction. The _Falcon_ flew like nothing else in the galaxy, but comfort wasn’t her forte. The flight to Takodana was cramped with just three humans and a Wookiee. Now, with thirty-four ragged Resistance fighters, several droids, and a handful of stowaway porgs jammed on board, it was uncomfortable verging on dangerous. 

With so many passengers, the oxygen cyclers were struggling to keep the air at breathable levels, a task made more difficult by the strain on the power systems as Chewie tried to coax every ounce of speed he could from the hyperdrive. He’d punched it on the way out of the system— fastest ship in the galaxy wouldn’t mean much if the First Order managed to lock on to them. 

They’d blown out of atmo and burned lines at breakneck speed, engines screaming, and now they were racing full bore through hyperspace. Rey could feel the low hum of the hyperdrive in her bones, a deep noise thrumming away at the back of the ship. It wasn’t quite loud enough to drown out the ominous sounds from the overburdened internal systems as they hurtled away from Crait. 

She and Leia and Poe were clustered around the cockpit discussing options. Once they’d fled the sector, the plan was no longer as simple as _run the hell away._ How much fuel did they have, where were they headed—

_“We can’t keep going like this,”_ Chewie said, prodding at the instrument panel. Three gauges were already in the red, a fourth ticking over into yellow as he worked. A hot electrical smell wafted toward them as a circuit overloaded, popping and crackling. Chewie yanked his hand away with a rough curse.

—how long could the _Falcon_ keep flying? 

Poe frowned. “I don’t understand. I know Han made some modifications, but this old girl was originally a cargo ship. Capacity shouldn’t be an issue.”

“It’s not that. The life support functions weren’t built to handle this many passengers. The ox cyclers are working over their max capacity and it’s putting additional strain on everything else.” She had to swallow the lump in her throat before she could keep going. “And there’s a compressor issue. Chewie’s right. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Leia’s face was a study in quiet grief, but she spoke with the practiced authority of someone used to both crisis and command. “Then we’ll have to put her down somewhere. Any ideas?”

The navicomputer was alive with hyperlanes. Stars and planets and asteroids filled the viewscreen, fuzzy and pixelated on the outdated tech, but overwhelming all the same. It was too much; too big. Finn had been right, back on Takodana. There was nowhere they could hide. 

The _Supremacy_ was out of commission, but the First Order’s reach was undiminished. Dozens of fleets, thousands of ships. Contacts in nearly every system. They’d escaped Crait by the skin of their teeth, but stars, how long could they stay free? 

_We have everything we need,_ Leia had said, but it was so hard to believe. When it came down to it, all they really had was a ship and a prayer. A broken lightsaber, a half-trained Jedi. More grief than they knew what to do with. 

She’d survived years on Jakku with only a sliver of hope and her own stubbornness to keep her going, but this was different. It wasn’t just her and the desert anymore. It was Finn, Leia, Chewie, Poe— her friends, all caught in the teeth of something bigger and more deadly than any sandstorm. It was all the other Resistance fighters, injured and scared and looking to her as their salvation. 

_I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to be responsible for this many people._ The thought seared through her, scalding and shameful. For a moment she was paralyzed by the enormity of it all before another groan echoed through the _Falcon_ and she pushed the fear away. There was no time for it.

“There,” she said, focusing the navicomputer on a planet in an isolated stretch of the Outer Rim. “Utapau. Will that work?”

Leia squinted at the screen. “Chewie?”

_“Well, it’s away from the major trade routes. The First Order shouldn’t have much of a presence there. Assuming it’s inhabited, we should be able to put into a spaceport without too much trouble.”_

“And if it isn’t inhabited?” Rey asked.

_“There’s not much else out here. Dagobah, maybe.”_

For some reason that made everyone laugh. 

“Then Utapau is it, I guess,” Poe said. The _Falcon_ continued to creak and strain. “Think we’ll make it there in one piece?”

“If we can keep the internal system temps below—”

“She’ll get us there,” Leia interrupted. There was a surety in her voice that had nothing to do with mechanics or probabilities. It wasn’t the quiet determination that had echoed through her words when she’d reassured Rey earlier. It was something more elemental, the fire at the heart of a star, a truth that held the universe together: the _Millennium Falcon_ was Han Solo’s ship, and Han Solo’s ship would not let them down.

It took all of Rey’s strength not to break down in tears right there in the cockpit doorway. Sorrow washed through Leia and Chewie’s Force signatures in a terrible raw wave, flooding over her and making her breath come sharp. Poe’s sadness was fainter, but just as real. Rey had known Han as a legend far longer than as a person, but that didn’t matter. Surrounded by people who’d loved him, who mourned him, his death cut through her like a blade, red and cruel. 

She leaned back against the bulkhead, suddenly too exhausted for words.

The slump marshalled something in Leia. She patted Chewie on the shoulder and then shifted her gaze to Poe. “Set a course for Utapau. Help Chewie with anything he needs, and let me know when we’re close.” She eyed the instrument panel, still sparking intermittently. “We won’t have much time, and we’ll need people ready to make any critical repairs as soon as we land.” 

“Yes ma’am,” he snapped off, squeezing past Rey to climb into the copilot’s seat. 

Leia turned to Rey. For the first time since Rey had known her, she looked old. Worn. “I think we could both use some rest.”

 

—

 

They made their way slowly through the ship, stepping carefully around the Resistance members bedding down in the corridors and common spaces, any place where there was room enough to fit a body. Finn was still sitting vigil with his wounded friend. He looked as exhausted as Rey felt, but he mustered up a tired smile for her as they passed by.

How was it that only a few weeks ago she’d chased him through Niima Outpost? She’d never planned on leaving Jakku without her family, and now she was thousands of lightyears away, racing desperately toward the edge of the Outer Rim, caught in the throes of a full-blown war. The First Order, the Resistance, the Force— none of that had mattered on a nowhere junkyard planet. The Western Reaches seemed impossibly distant now, the Rey who’d lived there a different person. 

_Let the past go. Kill it if you have to._

She shoved the memory away, focusing on the woman beside her. Leia was right: they both needed rest. 

Space was at a premium, but everyone had avoided the ship’s lone cabin. The hallway leading to it was mostly empty. Leia knew the way, but that didn’t mean Rey had to let her walk there alone. She offered her hand without thinking, and the woman she’d heard called General and Princess and Senator—Leia Organa, who loved and lost and somehow carried on, always, over and over—took it with a pained sigh. Her hand was small, the skin papery thin and spotted with age, but her grip was firm.

Hand in hand, they made their way to the captain’s quarters.

Rey and Chewie had flown the _Falcon_ together since Starkiller, but it was Han’s ship. It had been Han’s ship even when it was hidden away, rusting in Plutt’s junkyard. His death didn’t change that.

Chewie had a space of his own, a corner of one of the cargo bays set up the way he liked it, and he’d firmly rejected her offer of the captain’s quarters. Rey had curled up in the common area on the journey to Ahch-To. Neither of them had been willing to trespass in Han’s space. It was a kind of denial Rey knew all too well— a lie you told yourself to fend off despair.

It was a weak measure, a quarter portion held against the ever-hungry monster of starvation. You could live off it, but it left you aching for something more. Dreaming of something real.

Leia walked into the room in silence. Rey let her go, watching as she trailed careful fingertips along the walls. Even with the running lights on, the room was dark. It smelled faintly of dust. Han likely hadn’t touched it in years, since the _Falcon_ was first stolen, but—

Thieves and scavengers looked for parts, weapons, anything that would make for a quick profit. They didn’t care about personal effects, not if they couldn’t be sold for credits or traded for something useful. That was why Dosmit Raeh’s helmet had lain untouched in the sand all those years until Rey claimed it for herself. 

That was why Leia could walk over to the desk and pull out an old holograph. In it, a young woman stared out from a green forest, dwarfed by trees so tall their canopies were out of frame. Her gaze was annoyed, but the holocam had captured the twitch of her mouth as she started to smile. Rey knew without asking that Han was the one who’d coaxed that grin out of her, exasperation and delight in equal measure. 

Leia placed the holo back in the desk with careful hands. When she turned to face Rey once more, the ghost of that same smile was on her lips. 

“I was always afraid my face would get stuck like that.”

It startled a laugh out of Rey, hoarse and sharp. 

“Leia,” she said, struggling to find the words. “I don’t— what do we do now?”

“Keep going.”

“How?”

Leia was quiet for a long moment. “The same way you survived on Jakku, I imagine. You keep going because there isn’t any other option.”

Of course. Desert or freighter, princess or scavenger, that was what it came down to. Survival was hard, but it was simple.

She bit back a sigh, but whatever Leia read in her face made her continue.

“We’ll be okay. It won’t be easy, but we’ll be okay.” The words were low and sad but unshakeable as the sky. Even weighed down by memories, Leia shone in the Force; Rey could feel the promise resonate in her bones as surely as she could feel the distant droning of the hyperdrive. 

Her own voice was painfully small. “How can you be so sure?”

Leia laughed, a sound to echo Rey’s. “Experience, sweetheart. This isn’t my first war.”

“But— Luke, and Han, and—” _Ben_ died unspoken on her lips. Ben Solo was a lie, a mirage in the desert. She wouldn’t waste her heartbreak.

His name hung heavy in the air anyway. Leia’s smile dimmed. You didn’t need to be a Force-user to see what it cost her to keep her voice steady, but she managed. “We mourn them, hold their memories close, and carry on. That’s all we can do.”

It was a thin comfort.

 

—

 

Curled up in a quiet spot near the rear cargo bay, Rey tried to hold on to Leia’s surety. The General had lost her husband, her brother, her life’s work. Her son. If she could keep hope from slipping through her grasp like ashes, Rey herself could do no less.

What had she lost, after all? A dream of family? A legend or two? Nothing that had ever been hers in the first place.

_A vision,_ something deep in her chest whispered. 

_No,_ she countered, exhausted and heartsick. _That wasn’t mine either. It was as hollow as all the rest._

There was no need for windows in a freighter. The brilliant, swirling light of hyperspace wasn’t visible unless you were in the cockpit, but Rey could feel the galaxy burning around her as they blazed past unfamiliar stars.

She’d heard old spacers on Jakku say the stars were the same everywhere, but she didn’t believe it. Even with the vast, impossible miracle of the Force flowing through her, the adage rang false. Far away from the only constellations she knew by heart, Rey felt alone in a strange universe, too small for her own skin.

The desert left no room for regrets: you lived with your choices, or you didn’t. Avoid the badlands, or face a slow death from sunstroke. Heed the wind, or be swallowed by the _X’us’R’iia._ Scavenge enough to satisfy Plutt, or starve.

Jakku stripped away nuance the way sandstorms stripped flesh from bone. Rey was no stranger to binary choices, and yet— her thoughts kept circling back to an outstretched hand, trembling and desperate as fire flared around them like falling stars. 

_Please._

The Force eddied around her, a wind she couldn’t see. It tugged at something behind her breastbone, a thread unravelling, stretching out behind her, a tether of gossamer and shadow. There was no question where it led, and _oh,_ it made her ache. 

She recoiled as if burned, narrowing her awareness until the blooming sense of connection faded away. She focused on the cool metal flooring beneath her, the rough scrape of her pack against her cheek, the steady hum of the hyperdrive, slowing her breathing until the threat of tears receded and only the barest hint of pain remained, a second heart beating distantly in the cage of her ribs.

The effort left her drained. Battling Snoke’s guards and then plunging headlong into the mess on Crait had sapped more of her strength than she’d realized. Spots crept across her vision, dancing as she tried to blink them away, struggling to stay awake. 

She didn’t want to sleep. If she slept, she’d dream. The throne room, Snoke pulling apart her mind as though it were nothing more than scrap metal. Ben— Kylo Ren, solid at her back, on his knees in front of her. 

If she slept, there was no guarantee she could keep the connection locked down. 

She stayed awake as long as she could, listening to the sounds from the _Falcon,_ trying to catalogue the repairs that couldn’t wait when they landed at Utapau. Ox cyclers, and some of the wiring. They’d have to check the sublight engines and the hyperdrive both, make sure they were both good to keep flying.

The compressor chose that moment to sputter, the hyperdrive whining in protest. Rey counted out breaths, one, two, three, until the sound evened out again.

_That kriffing compressor is next,_ she promised herself. _As soon as I have time, it’s gone._

She finally drifted off, losing the battle to keep her eyes open as she imagined all the shoddy work she’d have to undo to remove the thing. 

Strange stars in unknown systems slid by as she slept, distant and close and then distant again. Through it all, the _Millennium Falcon_ kept flying.

If she dreamed, she did not remember it when she woke.

 

—

 

Her dreams stayed empty for a week, long enough for them to make Utapau and leave it again, putting the desolate, cratered world behind them after only ten hours.

Andelm IV was next, where Rey mind tricked a hapless junk dealer into giving them a deal on a small flock of ships. Two old, lightly-armed shuttles, a skiff, and one ancient starfighter of indeterminate make. The survivors could have fit on one shuttle, but no one was willing to risk it. Standing orders were to scatter if the First Order caught up with them; no matter what, the Resistance had to survive. 

They were headed into Wild Space now, a precautionary measure to stay hidden and shake any tails while they tried to regroup. Details from Crait were already filtering across the galaxy, and Leia was confident it was a call to action their allies would not be able to ignore. 

“The Jedi bring hope,” she said. “That’s half the battle right there. Next time we ask, we won’t be met with silence.”

Asking for help wouldn’t be simple, though. They couldn’t trust the ships they’d picked up to send secure transmissions, and anything coming from the _Falcon_ would draw the First Order down on them in a heartbeat. 

Emissaries would have to go to the planets that Leia knew they could count on: Naboo, Chandrila, Dantooine, dozens of other small planets that wouldn’t turn them away. Worlds unable the risk First Order’s wrath at Crait would find a way to accept a handful of refugees, survivors who’d been out of system during the Hosnian Cataclysm. Forty people among thousands wouldn’t raise any suspicion. The Resistance would go to ground and rise up stronger than before, but first, they had to get there. 

Rey kept watch over the tiny fleet in the _Falcon,_ leading them through the blue-white vortex of hyperspace, pulling back to guard the rear whenever they dropped back into realspace. The fleet dipped in and out of Wild Space, stopping only to refuel as they wove their way toward the first allied world, tracing along the ghost of the Triellus Trade Route. 

It was grueling work, half vector calculation and half gut instinct, skimming along the edges of marked routes and flying blind in the uncharted blankness of Wild Space. 

Chewie stayed on board with her, helping her navigate, taking over for her when she needed to rest. Sometimes Leia joined them as she rotated through the various ships, talking with every member, keeping morale up as best she could, but for the most part it was just the two of them.

After the crowded desperation of the flight from Crait, the ship seemed almost abandoned. Still a few hours out from the edge of Wild Space, Rey lay awake in the darkness of the captain’s quarters, trying to sleep.

Leia had insisted, gently overriding her protests that she’d slept in worse conditions than the cramped relief bunk in the common area. In the end, Rey didn’t have the heart to keep arguing with her.

The quarters were quiet. The noise from the sublight engines was faint, easy to ignore. With the door closed and her eyes squeezed shut, it almost felt like she was back on Jakku, alone in her AT-AT. 

Dark, close, achingly silent. Nothing in the desert but wind and loneliness. 

This was a different kind of loneliness than she was used to. Scavenger girl scratching marks on the walls and staring at the stars, dreaming of people who loved her— she’d been terribly alone, but never unsure of who she was. Now, she had people who cared about her, people she treasured, but there was a different emptiness in her heart. 

Ahch-To was supposed to have answers. 

The temple, the cave—powerful light, powerful dark—she’d gone through them both and all they’d given her were more questions. 

Luke had flinched from her power, from the darkness he felt as she reached for the cave, fear and an old, old agony etched clear on his weathered face.

She’d promised she wouldn’t fail him, and yet— she’d left. Fallen prey to Snoke’s twisted vision, to the sliver of false light she’d seen in Kylo Ren, and run headlong into danger. She’d channeled the light on Crait as she cleared away the rockfall, felt it surge through her veins, luminous and transcendent, but it hadn’t burned out the darkness. It was still there, the mirror and its painful truth, the fury in the throne room. 

If she was a Jedi, she was half a failure already. If she wasn’t a Jedi, what was she? 

Even if she could find the answer, she only had the barest idea of how to be a Force user. She’d figured out compulsion and levitation on her own, but timely rescue or not, there was more to the Force than making things float. She could find her way through the stars without a map, sense things in the Force, but she had no idea _how._

_Peace and purpose,_ she’d said to Leia, and she meant it. She’d felt the wholeness of Luke’s spirit as he passed, ragged edges gone, bitterness drained away, one at last with the Force. That she knew for sure. The mechanics of it— that she didn’t know.

How the Force actually worked, the limits of her strength, how to deal with the power flowing through her, she had no answers for any of it. Stars, where would she even start looking? 

She didn’t even have a lightsaber.

Abruptly, all she wanted was someone to tell her things would be alright. The deep weariness she’d felt that first night on the _Falcon_ came surging back, settling heavily in her chest. It sat there like a stone, like wreckage in the desert, blotting out the sun.

For a moment the darkness of the room seemed to deepen, and then the heaviness in her chest turned sharp and painful, a hook pressing into the softness behind her ribs. She forced herself to sit up, struggling through the hurt, and couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped her as she realized what was happening.

Half pain, half shock, the soft sound was deafeningly loud in the odd silence of the bond.  
Kylo Ren stared at her from the corner, his cloak a sweep of sable in the darkness of her room, a black hole swallowing all the light. Somehow, she could still see his face. 

Her gaze snagged on the line of his scar, the furious set of his jaw. She knew what rage looked like on his face— shadowed red and blue in a snowy forest, limned in fire in the throne room—

This was different. 

He held his fury like a thin veneer over a roil of emotion, a mask that didn’t matter at all when she could feel what he felt. Rage, yes, but also helplessness, anguish, and underneath all that—

A question, a plea, howling through bond, _why, why, why—_

She didn’t know how to explain it to him. Words welled up in her throat, _because I trusted you, because you fought with me_ tangling with _the transports, all those lives_ and her own refrain, his name, endlessly—

It thundered through both of them, a feedback loop of emotion and agony, the galaxy collapsing into nothing more than their shared connection, durasteel now instead of thread. 

She wrenched herself out of it, trying to wall herself off from the feeling. It was like huddling in her shelter during a storm; she could feel it roaring, battering at her defenses, trying to carve its way through and devour her. She bit her tongue, willing herself not to cry out.

And then as suddenly as it had arrived, the bond began to dissolve. The dark shape of him splintered, sound rushing back into the room as the Force surged and warped and streamed away, taking Kylo Ren with it.

The last thing she saw of him was his face, mouth open as he tried to speak, eyes full of some complex emotion she couldn’t decipher. 

_Rey—_

For a single heartbeat, her name lingered in the air like a ghost, and then she was alone once more. The pain in her chest faded, leaving her hollow, scraped clean as it drained away like sand. Only the memory of the ache remained, and the loneliness that summoned it.

Tears stung her eyes, and this time, she couldn’t hold them back.

 

—

 

The winds on Lothal blew soft, singing through the tallgrass in a whispery melodic rush. Wading through the long gray-green stalks, feathery tops just brushing her waist, Rey took a deep breath and tried to center herself in the stillness of the grasslands.

The endless plains were a wonder that reminded her of her first glimpse of Takodana. A different sort of green than the pirate hideaway, Lothal’s southern hemisphere was somehow lush and austere at the same time. Leia said it was a world in recovery, still healing from wounds dealt by the Empire, but there was a peace to the Force in the vast, scarred expanse of its prairies.

Nearly two standard weeks into their visit, they were banking on those wounds, hoping the memory of the Empire and the looming shadow of its successor would spur Lothal into supporting the Resistance. Leia was embroiled in her eighth consecutive day of diplomatic talks with the planet’s leaders, haggling over terms. Rey had joined her for the first few days, a Force-user standing at the General’s side as a show of strength and a beacon of hope, but diplomacy wasn’t her strong suit. After the third day she sought the prairies instead, trying to find a balance that had deserted her in the wake of Kylo’s appearance. 

She’d kept the bond a secret for reasons she didn’t entirely understand, dismissing her haggard appearance the next morning as exhaustion. It was only half a lie: she was tired down to her bones. The torrent of emotions had wrung her out, leaving her head fuzzy and her heart in turmoil. Her control of the bond was tenuous at best now, the strength of the connection waxing and waning at random no matter how diligently she tried to smother it. Weeks of struggle later, parsecs away from that fraught moment on the edge of Wild Space, she still didn’t know what to make of it.

Kylo Ren drowning himself in darkness, Ben Solo reaching frantically for the light— she couldn’t tell who’d been in her room. She didn’t want to know. She wanted the bond to stay dormant, to die out and leave her in peace. She wanted him to reappear, wanted to grab him and shake him, _demand_ answers, grasp his hand—

She didn’t know what she wanted, beyond an end to the confusion, so she walked through the tallgrass and tried to soak up the peace she so desperately needed, letting her senses drift out into the distance. All around her, deep gashes in the soil—the remnants of mineral deposits and old strip mines—were slowly filling in with green. Wildflowers wove through the tallgrass, a twilight-hued profusion of purple and silver and indigo, dotted here and there with a bright, ethereal blue that reminded her of starlines. 

Beauty growing from the memory of destruction; pain and healing, side by side. 

For a moment she was back on the island, eyes closed and senses extended, telling Luke what she could feel. 

_Life. Death and decay that feeds new life._

The memory shored up something in her heart, a balm that eased the anxious frustration plaguing her. 

_All things in balance,_ she thought. _Even war-torn worlds can heal._

The Force shimmered. 

“Sometimes,” a voice said, low and bitter. “If you’re lucky. Other wounds are too deep to heal.”

Kylo Ren was beside her, hands loose and empty at his sides. There were shadows under his eyes, stark and ugly against the pallor of his skin. For all the acid in his voice, the words themselves seemed almost rote, a child repeating a platitude.

_Ben._

She stopped walking, staring up at him as she drew in a careful breath, trying to stay anchored in Lothal’s peace. 

“And if they don’t heal? What then?”

The Force swirled around them, singing a gentle hymn beneath Kylo’s words as he answered. 

“We suffer, and carry on. What cannot endure will die.”

Had he ever been to Jakku? His maxim carried the same harsh fury as the storms she’d grown up with, the same brutal choice the desert had etched into her bones: survive, or die. The thought pricked at her like a spinebarrel, sharp and painful. She didn’t want to think about how they were connected. 

“Did Snoke teach you that?”

“No,” he sneered, “my family did.”

It hurt.

The throne room all over again— a hand extended, his name on her lips. Hope shivering in her heart, only to turn to lead; stupid scavenger girl played false once more. 

Her emotions were her own, no open line between them this time, but she was sure he could sense her anguish all the same. It seeped into her voice, thick and bitter as blood. Angry, she did nothing to temper it. 

“You made your choices, Kylo.”

His expression darkened, anger to match hers, veined with a bruised sort of frustration. She could see why he’d worn the helmet— a man who wanted to stand in the shadow of Darth Vader couldn’t afford such a sensitive mouth, eyes that betrayed every emotion. His thoughts were as easy to see as constellations on a clear night. Unmasked before her, his face held no secrets. 

“What happened to ‘Ben’?” he asked, voice still a sneer. The words were sharp and brittle as glass. “Or have you given up on your vision already?”

The serenity she’d drawn from Lothal was gone. In its place was the maelstrom of feeling she’d tried so desperately to soothe away, the whirl of betrayal and heartbreak that overtook them in the darkness of her cabin. 

_“Why?”_ she croaked out, the sound rough and plaintive. “Would calling you Ben change anything? Bring you back?”

The wind blew between them as his hands clenched into fists. Grass brushed against the shadow of his hands, and she wondered distantly if he could feel it.

“It didn’t make a difference on the _Supremacy,”_ she said, trying to steady herself. “It won’t make one now.”

“So that’s it,” he spat. “I thought a desert rat would have more mettle.” 

“This _desert rat_ knows better than to chase after a mirage,” she snarled back. 

“A mirage? What part of this isn't real to you?”

She wanted to scream. 

“All of it! I left Luke, I stood by your side, fought at your back—”

“You ran—”

“—I trusted you!” 

Her words hit him like a blow. He staggered, a lightning-struck tree teetering on unstable roots in the middle of Lothal’s great grass sea. She bit down viciously on the inside of her cheek, stifling the urge to reach out and steady him.

“I risked everything for you.” That was the hard truth of it, the kernel of pain that had festered and bloomed in her heart since the battle ended, Snoke dead at the foot of his throne and nothing different for it. 

“Everything,” he repeated. “Tell me, how do a crippled rebellion and a pair of broken down heroes compare to an empire? I laid the galaxy at your feet, Rey. I offered you the stars themselves.” He kept going, face filled with that same bruised frustration. “You think you took a risk? Snoke—” a thin breath, something blank and shuttered in his gaze, at odds with the venom in his tone. “Snoke is dead. I killed him.”

_For you,_ he didn’t add. She heard it all the same. The thought bled out from his mind to hers, stark and red, vivid as the salt scars on Crait. 

She wanted so badly to believe him. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She’d flown halfway across the galaxy on the belief that Ben Solo was still alive somewhere in his heart, reaching for the light. If he’d killed the Supreme Leader for her…

No. No, she wouldn’t fall for this twice. Kylo Ren killed Snoke, calculated and dispassionate, the apprentice slaying the master. He was no more a Sith than she was a Jedi, but they’d both chosen their sides. Rey could hold on to the memory of his hand in hers and wish things were different, but wishes didn’t change anything. Their connection didn’t matter: they stood apart. 

Equal, opposite. A lightsaber torn in two.

Kylo caught the trailing edge of that thought. 

“Rey—”

Her name, just like on the _Falcon_ , as if it were the only word he knew.

“No,” she said, the refusal spilling out of her. “We were both fools. Snoke stitched a lie into our heads. I don’t know why it’s still bringing us together like this, but neither one of us is going to turn. We’re both wasting our time here.”

He tried again.

“Please,” she said, cutting him off. “Please, Kylo. Just stop.”

His expression collapsed, frustration splitting open like a wound in the earth, deep and raw. Kylo looked as if he’d been hollowed out, all his hope shattered and ripped away. For a moment he stayed perfectly still, a portrait of unsurprised grief, frozen as he waited for her to call the words back.

It hurt, _oh_ , it hurt, but Ben Solo was a lie; there was only Kylo Ren. She kept her silence. 

One heartbeat, two, and then she watched as he drew on the familiar well of his rage, vulnerability vanishing from his features as though it had never been there at all. Nothing more than a trick of the light.

“Fine,” he snapped, gaze burning as he stared at her. 

The wind turned cold. If he could feel it, he gave no sign, looming dark and furious as the tallgrass swayed around him. In the end, Rey was the one who turned away, walking back in the direction she’d come. 

The camp was miles away. With every step, the tether between them strained and ached, a pain she resolutely ignored. A mile on, the Force crackled and sighed, and she could hear the whispery rustle of the grass again, stalks murmuring as she passed through. She kept walking, arms wrapped around herself to fend off the chill. The gesture did nothing to ease the sudden emptiness behind her breastbone.

She did not look back to see if he was gone.

 

—

 

Months passed.

The Resistance kept her busy, escorting ships across the galaxy: Velusia, Ryloth, Sullust, Dantooine. There were starlines burned into her vision now, electric blue smears she saw even when she closed her eyes. 

Chewie left to rally Kashyyyk to the fight. Leia’s fire burned on undimmed, but she tired easily. She spent most of her time on a command shuttle she’d wrested from a grossly outmatched Ruusanian diplomat, coordinating the growing ranks of spies and rebels via encrypted transmission. Poe complained bitterly about the difficulty of keeping up with her shuttle in the decrepit starfighter, but the whining was mostly for show. Finn and his friend—Rose, she’d learned—were embedded in a rebel cell on Fondor. Rumor had them infiltrating the planet’s orbital shipyards, an easier target than the industrial yards on Corellia or Kuat.

_Don't worry hotshot, we’re working on a new fighter for you_ , their last dispatch read, the code scrambling not enough to disguise Finn’s warm humor. It had come in weeks ago.

Her friends were scattered across the galaxy and largely out of reach. Unless you counted the porgs—which she emphatically refused to do—she was once again the sole inhabitant of her world. 

Rey travelled alone, save for the moments she did not. 

Kylo Ren phased in and out of her life like a shadow, a phantom built from glimpses and regret. The connection was never consistent. Days bled into weeks, weeks into month-long absences, but in the end they were always drawn back to each other, the tether between them pulled taut and singing with tension. 

For a moment, for an hour— Kylo lingered. 

A bruise high on his cheek in Felucia. Dark and fierce in battle armor on Kiros, knuckles white around the hilt of his saber, the beam hissing and spitting as it crackled over the dull roar of the waterfalls. Shadows under his eyes in the dim light of the starboard corridor, gathering in the hollows of his cheeks, face a study in chiaroscuro. Silhouetted against the towering peaks of Isde Naha, crowned in snow and the familiar stars of the Western Reaches, looking every inch the Supreme Leader. 

And then: washed out and pale against the glittering black sands of Ogem. 

Strangely foreign after so long away from Jakku, the grit that coated her boots and crept beneath her nails did not touch him. The sand was undisturbed. Perversely, it made her want to laugh. A nobody from a desert backwater haunted by the de facto emperor; how utterly ridiculous. 

_You’re nothing— but not to me._

She sat down in the deep shade of the planet’s strange trees, silvery-white bark as smooth as bone, spidery branches dripping with pale yellow fronds. She couldn’t see any flowers, but the trees gave off a gentle fragrance that reminded her of the nightbloomers she’d coaxed along in her AT-AT, dark and sweet. For a moment, she could almost feel the velvet blooms, cool and soft against her callused hands. The past seemed very close. 

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he said, deep voice carrying easily in the late afternoon stillness, the first time she’d heard it in months. There was no anger it, no pleading. A simple fact, as neutral as he could make it. 

Bits of mica clung to her skin as she dug her hands into the sand, glimmering even in the weak light filtering through Ogem’s ever-present cloud cover. If the past was close, so were its lessons. 

_Yes,_ she sent through the bond, the only kind of apology she could offer. _It does._

Kylo closed his eyes, breath gusting out of him in a sigh, but he did not reply. He didn’t need to. Between them, the Force shivered, tender and gray as a bruise. 

If he was a ghost at the edge of her world, at least she was haunting him in return.

 

—

 

The sacred texts were useless.

Easy enough to steal, wrapped in a blanket and smuggled out from the temple under cover of darkness as Luke sat listless and defeated in the rain. 

She’d forgotten about them in the first frantic days after Crait, caught up in the panic of running and too exhausted to remember she had answers at her fingertips. Of course, reading them was another challenge entirely. Rey had never struggled with Aurebesh before, the letters clicking together into words like parts slotting into an engine, patterned and regular. The Jedi texts written in Aurebesh were in an ancient form, familiar enough to recognize but foreign enough to slow her progress through them to a crawl. Others weren’t in Aurebesh at all, but in strange, dizzying scripts she couldn’t begin to parse. She knew Shyriiwook, Mando’a, Uthuthuma, Huttese, even bits of Teedospeak— the texts didn’t resemble any of them. 

Maybe Luke had known what they were. Maybe the knowledge had been lost before he ever arrived on Ahch-To. 

Flying escort missions was never simple, but it was routine: periods of tense piloting broken up by long stretches of downtime as she waited between flights, sitting on the sidelines while whomever she was safeguarding went about their work. She spent most of the time training with her staff, practicing with her blaster, trying to root out all of Plutt’s modifications to the _Falcon_ ; but in quiet moments she pulled out the texts and went about wrestling her way through them. 

She went letter by letter, piecing together fragments of words until she could guess at the context of a sentence here, the gist of a paragraph there. Invariably, she walked away with a headache that throbbed dully behind her eyes for hours afterward, punishment for so much time spent hunched over and squinting at faint writing that instinct told her was older than she could fathom. Still, she kept at it. Part of it was simple necessity. The Resistance needed her, and with Luke gone, she was flying blind. The books were her best shot at understanding her powers. 

The rest of it, she could admit to herself, was sheer stubbornness. Luke said it was time for the Jedi to end, but she’d seen the power of his sacrifice. One Jedi stepping out of the shadows on Crait had kindled the whole galaxy with hope. 

_Kylo failed you. I won’t._

The temple, bathed in light; the cave, beckoning with darkness and mirrors. The Force flowed through it all, light and dark in an endless, balanced dance, turning the island into a harmony of power. 

She made Luke a promise on Ahch-To, and she was going to keep it. She’d stumble along the way, and doubtless he would disapprove of touching the dark, trying to recreate that balance inside herself, but the legacy of Luke Skywalker deserved a better end than _last of the Jedi._

And so, the books.

Rey had the _Falcon_ idling in an isolated swath of stars near the Tion Cluster, waiting to shepherd a spy to safety after an information drop. Exfil wasn’t scheduled for nearly a full standard day, so she’d spent the last few hours grappling with a translation. The spare quatrain was written in Aurebesh so archaic it was barely recognizable, and there was an internal scheme to the poem, a lilting sort of repetition that made her feel like she was translating nonsense, but instinct told her to keep working. 

The broken halves of the Skywalker saber had been easy enough to deconstruct. Mapping out the wiring, examining the coils and conductors, studying the heft and design of the hilt— she had a blueprint for that, treating the work like any other mechanical endeavour. The power source was where she’d run into trouble. The crystal at the base of the blade was fragmented beyond repair. Shards of it must have been lost as she and Kylo struggled over it, but even if she had all the pieces she wouldn’t risk activating it. 

“Laser sword” was woefully, laughably inaccurate. The destructive power of a fully operational lightsaber was terrifying, carving through rock and searing through durasteel, instant and effortless. A malfunctioning saber was a catastrophe she refused to contemplate.

Rey was confident she could fabricate the housing and most of the internal workings, but she had no idea what kind of crystal a new blade would need, let alone where to source one. The fragments were different from anything she’d ever seen. Even broken, they sang in the Force, echoing with hymns of grace and strength. It was no ordinary gem; that much was obvious. The Jedi Order started out as a religious movement, but the martial bent had been there from the beginning. There had to be some mention of the crystals in the texts.

Weeks of searching had turned up nothing but the kriffing quatrain, but she was so _close—_ just this one word— 

“Kaiburr?” she said aloud, rolling the word across her tongue, testing out the pronunciation. It was no more familiar spoken than it was written. She groaned in frustration and pushed the book aside, letting her head thunk down on the dejarik table. “Useless.”

The ache building behind her eyes dimmed, eclipsed by the sharp tug in her chest. When she looked up, Kylo was seated across from her, vaguely startled but posture loose, as if the Force had caught him in a rare moment of rest.

_Well_ , she thought wryly. _At least he’s wearing a shirt this time._

The bond twinged, fraught and shuddering. They rarely spoke during these moments, but silence was often as painful as conversation. The shadows under his eyes were deeper than ever. It made him look almost gaunt, she thought with a trace of concern, before she realized she was staring. Cheeks heating, she refocused on the manuscript in front of her.

_Kaiburr_ had to be the power source, but the word itself meant nothing to her. Another term for crystal? Some specific type of mineral? Unless she was way off base and it was something else entirely, an ancient Jedi term for energy or student or crucible, something she’d never be able to parse without more context.

_The kaiburr is the heart of the blade, the heart is the kaiburr of the Jedi—_

“Crystal.”

Startled, Rey jerked her head up to meet Kylo’s gaze. “What?”

“You’re right,” he said, quiet and somehow fragile, even as he struck an academic tone. “Kaiburr means crystal. It’s an archaic spelling of kyber, as in kyber crystal. _The crystal is the heart of the blade._ ”

The quatrain unfolded in her mind like light, pure and radiant. The verses themselves were not beautiful, but there was a certain elegance to the way they came together, links forged into a chain, truth upon guiding truth.

“The crystal is the heart of the blade,” she found herself saying. Her voice faltered as Kylo joined her, but she kept going. “The heart is the crystal of the Jedi. The Jedi is the crystal of the Force. The Force is the blade of the heart.”

The silence that followed felt as precarious as the descent into a wreck; one false step and everything could collapse. Anyone trying to scavenge in the belly of a scuttled ship knew to move carefully. And yet lingering was just as dangerous— stay frozen in one spot too long and muscles cramped, joints seized up, the whole body stiffening until you couldn’t move at all. The longer you stayed, the harder it was to make that next move. Sometimes you had to jump, and trust that the structure would hold. 

“How did you know?” she asked, tone deliberately even. She couldn’t stop the nervous tap of her fingers, but Kylo’s eyes stayed on hers. The bond was open, flaring between them with enough power that she could feel exactly how much it cost him to answer. 

“My uncle—” he paused. “Skywalker.” There was something haunted and deeply ashamed buried beneath the anger in his voice. “He said it was a rite of passage for every Jedi. Initiates would journey to find their crystal, and then assemble their lightsaber.” Kylo broke off for a long moment, the bond flooded with emotion. Familiar now, she stifled the urge to reach for him. Instead, she pulled her hands into her lap and waited for him to resume. 

“He built his saber in the middle of a war, but he wanted me to make the journey, to learn the ceremony. ‘We build in times of peace,’ he said. ‘And we honor the Jedi who came before us.’” His expression tightened, a muscle in his jaw working as he tried to tamp down his anger. “I was Skywalker’s first student, the beginning of a New Jedi Order. He wanted me to know my history.”

There was a terrible ugliness behind those words, looming huge and dark, swallowing all the air in the room. Wreckage trembling, sand shifting beneath her feet. 

“Well,” she said carefully when it was clear he was done talking. “That seems a little unreasonable.” She swept an arm across the table, a gesture that encompassed the mess of books and half-written notes covering the small space. “There’s a lot of history, and a good chunk of it is indecipherable.”

He blinked at her, confused, and she could have slapped herself.

“Oh kriff,” she said. “You can’t see any of that, can you? It’s— books. Lots of books. Old Jedi texts in archaic Aurebesh and a bunch of other impossible languages I’ve never heard of.”

A flare of academic interest drifted out from his mind before he caught himself, retreating back into a distant sort of regret. She couldn’t tell if it was for the texts, invisible and out of his reach, or because they still had no idea how the bond truly functioned.

_Can you see my surroundings? I can’t see yours. Just you._

She’d been too angry to answer then, before the fire, before Luke’s confession. The throne room, Lothal, a handspan and an endless stretch of stars between them at the table. It was hard to think monster, now. It was hard not to.

Her name tumbled out in a rush of breath. “Rey, the saber—”

“It’s broken,” she said, cutting him off. “We wrenched it clean in two.”

He flinched. “Too broken to fix? I thought you specialized in wreckage.”

She struggled to find an answer. The blade was tucked away in her quarters, stowed carefully out of sight after she finished going through it. She hadn’t allowed herself to contemplate repair. Beneath the crystal hymns, the weapon thrummed with a history she couldn’t begin to know. She could guess the basics: triumph and blood, lost, found, lost again. Rey herself was a lost thing, but deeper than that, the blade carried a sky’s worth of pain. Kylo was wrong about many things, but in this she agreed with him. Grief like that was better left in the past. 

“I’m a scavenger, not a miracle worker.” She stared down at her hands, remembering the weight of the saber, the hum of it as it ignited. “I know when to cut my losses. Some things aren’t worth the effort.”

Kylo’s end of the connection went abruptly blank, a door in her mind she’d barely known was open suddenly slamming shut. Somehow, the thread between them had become familiar, the distant brush of his mind against hers expected. Welcome, even. Before she could process that, he was speaking again. 

“Ilum,” he said hoarsely. “That’s where you’ll need to go for a kyber crystal.” 

The emotion still missing from his mind was all there in his voice. The blankness was starting to scare her— Kylo was furious, haughty, afraid, but never— _blank._

“Wait,” she blurted, “why are you— what’s going on?”

“Rey—”

And then he was gone. If it were possible to strangle a metaphysical cosmic energy, she would have done so gladly. She stared at the empty space where he’d been just seconds before, trying to parse what happened. She could guess why the Skywalker saber mattered so much to him, but the rest of it…

Why had he helped? He could have stayed silent and watched her flounder, stuck on kaiburr and half-sick with frustration, and instead he just— dropped the solution in her lap. 

_Ilum._

It was an answer to a desperately important question, one that had dogged her for weeks, but now that she had it, the knowledge left her feeling oddly hollow. Her headache was back, the running lights in the _Falcon_ suddenly too bright to handle. She closed her eyes, trying to center herself. Han Solo’s ship was no downed Star Destroyer, ravaged by time and desert winds, but Kylo’s disappearance left in its wake the same desolate emptiness that filled those vast wrecks. 

The bond was silent. It stayed that way through the rest of her downtime, through the exfil and the return flight to meet up with Leia’s command shuttle, through the debrief and beyond. She caught herself looking for Kylo, scanning rooms and corridors and coming up empty. She scolded herself every time, but it didn’t stop her from looking. It didn’t stop the ache curling in her chest, not the sharp hook of the bond but rather the familiar gnaw of abandonment.

She waited, and kept waiting. 

Kylo stayed distant, the connection between them closed and shuttered. All that remained of the thread was a tracery of static and darkness, stretching out into an endless silence even the desert couldn’t match.

 

—

 

Ilum was space dust and debris and two far-flung moons. Ilum was snow and sharp wind, a bleak forest where memories loomed, filling her veins with remembered rage and a hard-edged grief.

Ilum was Starkiller. 

The moon beneath her feet was scarred. Great gashes rent the surface, pale rock shattered by the force of the base’s destruction. A faint scent hung in the air, familiar and caustic; the bitter tang left behind by a lightning strike. Only it was no lightning strike— it was the death of a planet, the last vicious remnants of a superweapon that killed— 

For the first time since it slammed shut, she was glad the bond was silent. She didn’t know what she would have said to him if he were there. The thought made her itch for a lightsaber, hand dropping instinctively to her hip even though she knew full well that all she’d find was empty air. The staff slung across her back felt inadequate; she wanted to throttle him, to lash out with all the confused, broken fury the moon had conjured in her. 

_You have that look in your eyes, from the forest._

_Monster,_ she thought in answer, vicious even though she was alone in her mind. _You sent me to a graveyard. You sent me to Starkiller._

Yet he hadn’t lied. Shimmering against the rock and ice, crystals crept up through the wounds. They hummed in the Force, a soft chorus singing beneath the moan of the wind. The sound drew her toward the lip of a canyon, deeper than any damage she’d come across so far. Old geology or new scar, she supposed it didn’t matter— whatever its origin, she’d have to make her way to the bottom. 

The descent was brutally steep. Nearly two hours later, breathing hard and beginning to overheat beneath the layers of winter gear she’d borrowed for the trip, she reached the floor of the gorge. The singing had grown stronger, one voice rising above the rest. It called out to her, drawing her into a patch of crystals hidden in deep shade, barely visible in the weak starlight. Sun devoured and planet destroyed, Ilum’s moons were slowly drifting away from their old orbits, slipping further and further into the darkness of the Unknown Regions. Rey didn’t want to linger. 

Clinging to a crevice in the canyon wall, tenacious as a spinebarrel, a kyber sang to her. Low and sweet, no, high and clear— all she could tell was that the sound bloomed in her heart as though the Force itself were calling her name, _Rey, Rey, Rey._

The crystal was luminous. Stripping off her gloves, she reached for it with careful fingers, sucking in a breath as it fell into her palm with a shivery chime. The facets were rough, like salt or stone, but the edges were sharp and slick as glass. There a solidity to it she hadn’t expected, though maybe she should have. The poem rose in her mind, the heart of the blade, the blade of the heart. It made sense: hearts were heavy burdens. 

She tucked the crystal away and pulled her gloves back on, bracing herself for the climb back out. Ilum’s second moon wandered into view above her as she made her ascent, smaller and more badly damaged. Though it too was empty, there was an inexplicable sadness to the sight of it, broken and lonely, lost in the forbidding darkness of uncharted space. 

_Don’t_ , she told herself sternly. _Don’t go down that path_.

Still, she couldn’t help but look back at the moons as she navigated the debris field, hyperdrive spooling up, ready to make the jump as soon as she was clear. The ruins of Ilum floated around the _Falcon_ , vast and heartbreaking as the sea. Near the edge were the moons, both trapped, both drifting away even as gravity pulled them together. 

The same internal knowledge that guided her safely through the stars told her the two satellites would likely crash into each other, collision almost inevitable. There was a sadness to that ending, destruction on the heels of devastation. She swallowed, trying to ignore the thought. 

Maybe Ilum’s moons would meet a kinder fate. If they didn’t obliterate each other, there was a chance they’d become a binary pair, pushing and pulling each other into a stable orbit, an endless partnered dance. It was a foolish hope, slim and desperate and— pointless. Moons weren’t lonely. They felt no sorrow, no fear. No longing for something gentle to follow the pain. 

She turned back to the controls. The stars blurred and burned around her, lines streaking across the cockpit as she engaged the hyperdrive. Ilum faded into the distance; it eased something in her chest, fractured grief no longer weighing so heavily. In its place was the bruised frustration that had shadowed her since Kylo’s disappearance. The _Falcon_ , the crystal, her own thoughts— none of it dulled the loneliness. 

Far away in the darkness, Ilum’s moons kept drifting. Somewhere in the distance, Kylo stayed silent. 

Rey flew on alone, wrapped in starlight and static, and wondered why the weight of such emptiness still surprised her.

 

—

 

Her saber came together with an ease that was almost frightening.

A week and change out of Ilum, she had the _Falcon_ idling near the border of Wild Space, hidden in the lee of Comra. There was little traffic in this sector of the Outer Rim; it was safe enough for her to venture planetside and gather the materials she needed. Several days spent tracking down weapons-grade durasteel, another couple for everything else. Three to machine the parts, followed by hours spent poring over her plans, checking and rechecking the design.

The acquisition and fabrication had gone so well that she was almost expecting the actual assembly of the blade to be a nightmare. Instead, the crystal hummed as she laid everything out on the table, urging her on. 

The Jedi texts were— vague. _Visualize_ , was all they had to say about saber construction; a directive, certainly, but not a clear one. Visualize what? Battle? The Force? The lightsaber itself?

A deep surge of power rose from the kyber, washing over her and drawing a tide from her in answer. Almost without thinking, she folded herself down onto the floor, legs crossed, palms open and waiting. It was the pose of the black and white Jedi from the temple mosaic, balanced, ready. The Force flowed through Rey as it flowed through that ancient figure, and the answers fell into place. 

_Visualize._

Wiring and conductors, regulators and insulation, emitter shrouds and outer housing, it all lifted off the table into the air, floating softly on a silver current of the Force. The parts hovered around her, spinning slowly. Her schematics shimmered in her mind, the imagined blade becoming solid and real. Piece slotted into piece, each one sliding into place in a seamless glide. 

_The crystal is the heart of the blade. The heart is the crystal of the Jedi. The Jedi is the crystal of the Force. The Force is the blade of the heart._

Her hands closed around the cool metal of the hilt. When she opened her eyes, the lightsaber was whole before her, the crystal still singing inside it. The Force swirled around her, radiant and shadowed both. 

She ignited the blade. Brilliant blue light burned at each end of the hilt, bright and fierce as the Jakku sky, the first searing touch of dawn bleeding through the darkness of a desert night. The saberstaff fit in her hand as the Skywalker weapon never had. It was a blade unburdened by the weight of the past, shaped by old traditions but not bound by them. The Jedi Order was gone, but this she could carry into the future. This she could build on.

_It’s so..._ The thought spooled out into nothing, lost in the rush of her wonder, her heart singing counterpoint to the blade, note after note of pure triumph. And yet—

The triumph wasn’t hers alone. A wash of pride, an undercurrent of sorrow— Kylo’s end of the bond was open once more. His emotions were muffled, the low echo of thunder in the distance, but she could feel them.

She twisted her wrist. It was a move born of long practice, learned through hours of repetition, honed in desperate fights in the Graveyard of Giants, scrabbling first for the rights to a part and then simply to stay alive. The lightsaber scythed through the air, a perfect balance of staff and blade both, and she let herself finish the thought. _It’s so light._

The sadness spread through the bond, lit with shame and longing. 

_And it works?_ His answer was almost a question, the words clear though he was nowhere in sight. No explanation, no acknowledgement of that awful, empty silence.

The saberstaff was still humming in her hand. It was too easy to imagine raising it against him, sky blue against bleeding red. His saber was so different from hers; she remembered the weight of it, unstable and overpowered, always a hair away from shattering. A blade that screamed instead of sang. 

“Enough,” she said aloud. Rey was sick of memory. She didn’t want the forest. She didn’t want betrayal in the throne room, or the unexpected cruelty of a silent bond. Perhaps he heard that thought, or the Force did. Whichever it was, when the connection between them faded it was gradual, a slow easing instead of a slammed door. There were no more words, but she could still feel him, the storm of his mind like a faraway shadow on the horizon. 

She deactivated the blade, tired pride wrestling with the same hollow feeling Kylo always left behind. In the end, neither won. She left the schematics and tools in a mess on the table and retreated to the cabin, abruptly exhausted. The saber itself she tucked away in her pack, in easy reach of the bed. Crawling beneath the covers, she closed her eyes and listened as the humming of the crystal died away, blade silent now that it was no longer in her hand. 

Leia wasn’t expecting her back anytime soon. She could take a day or two and just— rest. Maybe that would give her enough time to untangle how she felt. Why she was so angry, why she cared at all— 

_Be honest._ She was too worn for anything but the truth. _You missed him._

The sublight engines were no more than a whisper at idle, especially after the kyber song, but their noise was blessedly familiar. The Force, Kylo, the legacy of the Jedi, the frantic reality of life on the run— all of it fell away as she focused on the sound. Mechanical problems were easy: find the problem, make the fix, or scrap it for parts. More and more, she ached for that simplicity. 

She listened for a while longer, until a faint roughness crept into the sound. _Drive system_ , she thought drowsily to herself. _Gotta flush the lines._

If only every solution were as clear.

 

—

 

She woke to soft sheets and the chill of recycled air.

Vaguely alarmed even through the lingering fog of sleep, she kept still as she tried to puzzle out where she was. Not the _Falcon_ , which always smelled like engine grease and old metal. Not Rodia, where Leia had organized a meeting of Resistance leaders. It was a risk, so many critical people gathered in one location, but there were things the General was unwilling to trust to encryptions. In theory, Rey was shadowing Leia for security purposes; in reality, Leia had ordered her to rest. 

Only an idiot disobeyed General Organa, so she’d spent the past week on Rodia, wandering endlessly along the canals, dodging the local fauna, trying to convince her lungs she was breathing air instead of soup. The planet’s domed cities were hothouses; even with the climate controls on their lowest setting, the room she’d been given was uncomfortably warm. Tinkering with the cooling system wouldn’t exactly endear the Resistance to their hosts, so she’d roasted in silence. Jakku was hellish at best, but at least the desert was a _dry_ heat. 

If the air was cold enough to chill, she wasn’t planetside. Reaching out with the Force, she felt tentatively for signs of life. What she found knocked the breath from her lungs. Rodia, but only the shadow of it, impossibly distant. Around her she could feel tens of thousands of lives, all clustered together, but they too were shades. Dim flickers in her awareness, they seemed too faint to be real. Only one thing was as vivid as it should be, a beacon in a sea of shadows, raw and burning and painfully familiar. 

She opened her eyes to the broad expanse of Kylo’s back. Scars, a constellation of freckles that her eyes darted over without her permission, and skin, so much skin, pale against the black sheets— a strangled yelp burst from her mouth before she could stifle it. Kriffing hell, this was his _bed._

The noise woke him. Before she could move, he rolled over, hand outstretched and reaching instinctively for the Force. Power slammed through her, a violent wind that left her untouched. No stones fell at his command, but the look on his face was the same, shock dusted with horror. 

“Rey?” He sat up, jerking back from her as if he’d seen a ghost. “What— how— you’re here?”

She scrambled off the bed, wincing as her bare feet met cold durasteel. It had taken ages to break the habit of sleeping in her boots, a practicality born of years in the desert. Storms, snakes, the occasional nighttime attack; Jakku scoured wariness into the marrow of whoever managed to survive it. She regretted the lack now, the soles of her feet freezing as she stared awkwardly at Kylo.

“I don’t know,” she snapped. “I fell asleep on— I fell asleep somewhere else. I woke up here.” She shifted from foot to foot, struggling with the urge to wrap her arms around herself. “Wherever we are. It’s sub-zero in here.”

“Wait,” he said, horror giving way to the scholar she suspected was buried somewhere inside him. “Here? What else can you see?”

She couldn’t fault him for ignoring the implied question, not after she’d been careful not to mention Rodia. She yanked her gaze away from Kylo and looked around. The rest of the room was dark, insubstantial as smoke. She could make out the hazy shape of a desk, a neat stack of holopads. A low table near the bed, lightsaber resting in easy reach. Beyond that, nothing. The only solid things in the room were the floor beneath her feet, the bed, and Kylo himself. 

“Not much,” she answered. “You, a stretch of flooring, and the—” she waved her hand in his direction. “The bed.” She was sure her voice wobbled on the last word, but Kylo didn’t seem to notice. He was staring at her, something like wonder on his face, something like pain. 

Weeks of silence, even after the bond reopened. No explanation, no apology, and he had the gall to look at her like— like that.

“You’re really here.”

“Seems that way,” she agreed bitterly. 

The pain sharpened, and then he schooled his expression into something more neutral. 

“You’re angry.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” There was an edge to her voice she couldn’t quite smooth out. “You vanished.” The words hung in the air like an accusation, one he didn’t deny. 

The mask cracked, guilt washing across his features. “I didn’t mean to,” he said, low and sincere. Almost pleading. “Rey, I swear to you, I didn’t mean to shut you out.”

Anger chased the chill from her veins. He had to know what kind of loneliness he’d left her to. How could he not? They’d drifted at opposite ends of a tether for nearly a year, separate but connected. The loss of him ached, the wound sudden and slow to heal.

_You’re not alone_ wasn’t a promise, she knew that, but some foolish part of her had believed it anyway. It was one more betrayal, however small, however abstract. She should start tallying them up, another endless count of something that never mattered at all. 

No, that was wrong. Something that had only mattered to her, simple little desert rat who didn’t know any better.

He looked stricken. She didn’t care.

“How.” The question came out flat. 

“Rey—”

“No,” she said, voice as remote as she could make it with hurt roiling furiously in her veins. Let him feel her through the bond if he wanted to; she’d give him nothing in person. “It’s clear you know how to manipulate the connection, so tell me how to get back. Tell me how to leave.”

He was staring at her, knuckles white where his hands gripped the sheets. Regret spread across his face like a bruise. 

“I can’t.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she snarled, losing her grip on her temper. It bled out into the room through the bond, filling the space between them with sharp edges, and she had the satisfaction of watching him flinch.

“It’s not a lie,” he said. “Crystals, ceremonies, Jedi lore.” _Skywalker,_ she heard in the heavy pause that followed. “All of it is— tainted. Difficult to think about, so I tried to shove it away. Instead, I severed whatever thread— no, that’s not right, the connection was intact. I shut a door. By the time I realized it was there, let alone that it was closed, I was already stuck on the other side.”

He thought about the bond in the same terms she did: a door, a thread. She didn’t know whether that made it better or worse, if it eased the ache or sharpened it. 

“It’s not a lie,” he repeated. “I tried, but I couldn’t reopen it.” There was something he wasn’t telling her, some knot of pain he kept hidden, but it was drowned out by the torrent of feeling pouring out of him. All of it—shame, rage, grief—came through the bond, unvarnished and overwhelming.

_I missed you._

It wasn’t an apology, because _sorry_ had stuck in his throat long before he was Kylo Ren, but it was something close, a wordless offering she couldn’t find it in herself to refuse. He knew exactly how bereft she’d been, alone in the dark and the silence. It was the same for him, locked out of the bond with only his guilt for company. 

Ilum’s moons rose in her mind, the comparison she’d fought so hard to ignore. Two lonely, half-wrecked strangers hovering on the brink of collision. She didn’t want that. She’d never wanted it.

“You’re forgiven.” The words were unfamiliar but she forced them out all the same. Jakku didn’t teach forgiveness, but it did teach drought. For all that he couldn’t say it, Kylo was desperate for mercy the way a traveller in the desert was desperate for water. Han, the war, the throne room— there were things she couldn’t let go, things he’d never be able to atone for, but this— 

She could forgive him this.

Though he tried to hide it, she caught the look of relief as it flickered across his face, tired and fleeting. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “I’ve been studying,” he said, the scholar back in his voice. “Meditating, really, trying to figure out how to replicate the control I had, even if it was limited—” he broke off, watching as she chafed at her arms, once again aware of the chill. “You’re cold.”

It startled a laugh out of her, rusty and sharp. “How could you tell? I’ve only been shivering since I first got here.”

He flushed, reaching automatically for the blanket before he stopped mid-motion, clearly thinking better of it. She had the belated, deeply embarrassing realization that his chest might not be the only part of him that was bare. 

“Do you want—” 

“No!” she blurted, “I’m fine! It’s fine.” The bed was out of the question. Still, the rest of the room had all the solidity of a shadow. There was nowhere else to go, unless she wanted to try her luck with the desk and hope it was real enough to hold her. Cheeks flaming even as the rest of her still felt frozen, she turned away and folded herself to the floor, her back against the side of the bed. It was a massive, luxurious thing, a low frame topped with a deep, feathery mattress; sitting down, her head barely cleared the edge. 

She felt very small next to it. Cold and vulnerable both, she drew her knees up to her chest, determinedly ignoring the sound of movement behind her. Kylo got up and padded away, and then the low hiss of a drawer opening echoed from the other side of the room. A flash of panic jolted through her, a sudden fear that now that she’d taken her eyes off him he would fade away into the shadows. Blush or no, she couldn’t stop herself from turning to look, halfway convinced he was already gone. 

Instead—

The wide, solid plane of his back, slabbed with muscle that rippled smoothly as he shrugged into a tunic, skin and scars vanishing beneath dark fabric. That made it worse somehow; it was easier not to stare when he was unclothed, hiding behind the shield of privacy. Dressed like this, hair mussed and arms left bare, it was impossible to force her eyes away.

_I missed him, that’s all_ , she thought. _I haven’t seen him in months._

Ridiculous. She was still drinking in the sight of him when he turned back to her, grabbing the blanket from the bed as he crossed the room.

“Here,” he said, voice just the slightest bit rough as he settled the blanket over her shoulders. Calluses snagging on the soft wool, she huddled into the warmth it offered, chasing the last lingering traces of body heat. There was a woodsy smell to it, like soap and spice and something dark and deeply green. It was faint but heady, and she couldn’t stop herself from taking a deep breath of it. Stars, was she ever going to stop blushing?

Kylo eased himself down next to her, an awkward tension humming through the bond. She couldn’t tell who it came from, but she honestly didn’t care. Sitting beside him was like sitting near a furnace: he radiated heat. Tired from the emotional whiplash, hunched miserably beneath the blanket, it took a staggering amount of self-control not to just— lean into him. She felt like a sand lizard in the early morning, slow and stupid, drawn out of its burrow to bask in the sun. 

The image made Kylo huff, a quiet sound she could almost mistake for a laugh. “Cold and tired,” he amended. “You should get some rest.”

She wondered how he’d react if he knew that was the same order his mother had given her. 

“Easier said than done,” she replied, jaw cracking around a yawn. Talking about the Resistance would just lead to a fight, so she left it at that. He didn’t seem inclined to push. Instead, they sat silently for a while, until Rey was struggling to keep her eyes open. 

“You don’t have to stay awake,” he said.

“Yes I do,” she countered. “I want to know where I am when I wake up again.”

“Alright,” he said. “Though I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it either way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re physically here. That suggests the bond was never anything as simple as a mere Force projection.” He frowned, considering the implications. “The amount of power it would take to travel through the galaxy like this is beyond staggering. It’s incalculable.”

“Wait,” she said. “I don’t understand. Snoke is dead. Any residual power the bond has should be weakening, fading away. Not— growing.”

“It was never Snoke.”

“What? Of course it was. He planted a lie in our heads, made us think we could turn each other. Get what we wanted. He manipulated us both, start to finish.”

“He did lie,” Kylo agreed. “In the throne room, when he said the bond was his doing. He was a monstrously powerful Force user, but to orchestrate four encounters and still have enough left to torture you? No. That would have been too much, even for him.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because Snoke always lied.” _Unless the truth was worse._

There was a lifetime of pain in those unspoken words. She shifted uneasily, wrapping the blanket more tightly around herself. “That isn’t exactly compelling evidence.”

“Skywalker—” he broke off. Then, more quietly, “Luke’s Force projection killed him.”

She knew that. She’d known since Crait, since the moment Luke Skywalker—hero, legend, bitter old man who finally found a new hope—passed into the Force. But if that was Kylo’s explanation...

“You’ve known for ages. Back on Lothal, and every time it connected us afterward. Why didn’t you say something?”

A bitter smile twisted his mouth. “Why didn’t you ask?”

The answer wasn’t hard to guess: because neither of them could bear any more false hope.

She closed her eyes, another headache starting to pound against her temples. “So if it wasn’t Snoke, what’s doing this? Why do we keep seeing each other?” _And why am I stuck here?_ she bit back, but the connection was wide open. Kylo heard it anyway.

“I don’t know,” he said. “My best guess is that this is the will of the Force.” The bitterness in his smile seeped into his voice, ugly and sour. “Force bonds were common during the height of the Jedi Order; master and padawan, battle partners, people who were close. But the bonds were limited, and they generally developed quite slowly. Nothing like this.”

“So, what? The Force wants us to be friends?”

“I didn’t say it was a good guess.”

She winced. “No— just. Why?”

The bitterness faded, bone-deep exhaustion taking its place. For a moment, Kylo sounded lost, as worn down as she felt. “I don’t know.”

Ahch-To, light and dark calling to each other in an endless song, echoing through the whole of the island. The Jedi mosaic, black and white, the saber in the middle drawing from each. Snoke’s voice, the truth more devastating than any lie: _darkness rises, and light to meet it._

The answer was there, but stars, she was so tired. 

“Can we talk about something else? Please?”

He sighed, long and low. His hand, loose at his side, curled briefly into a fist before he forced himself to relax. The awkward tension was back, a thrumming undercurrent to a heavier emotion, one she couldn’t identify. Anger? Nervousness? What did he have to be nervous about, after everything that had already happened?

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Anything.”

“I was born on Chandrila.”

She blinked, taken aback. Stories of his homeworld didn’t exactly mesh with _let the past die._ “Okay,” she said slowly. “And?”

He forged ahead. “Everything there is verdant. A thousand shades of blue and green, enough to put Lothal to shame.”

“Really?”

Again, that quiet huff of a laugh. “Really,” he said. “Of all the places I’ve lived, Chandrila was easily the most beautiful. Imagine a world made as Jakku’s opposite: gentle hills, deep forests, countless lakes. Life everywhere.”

Kylo was no storyteller. The words came haltingly, as if he had to pluck each one from the vault of his memory, but the scene shimmered around her nonetheless, clear and lovely.

“My room always smelled like balmgrass, especially in the summer and early autumn, when the winds blew. No matter the season, the forest birds would cry out at dusk. I haven’t been back, but I imagine that’s still the case.”

“It sounds like a dream,” she said, blanket slipping off her shoulders as she fought back another yawn. Kylo caught it, tucking the fabric carefully back into place. Force, even his hands were warm. How did he manage it in such a frigid room? Again, she had to battle the temptation to curl into the heat of him.

“Keep going,” she ordered, letting herself inch just a little bit closer.

He did. He told her about crystalline lakes, with waters as smooth as glass when they were still, like mirrors reflecting a handful of sky. Low hills dotted with wildflowers, fox-creatures at home wandering forests and city streets alike, the soft bite of mild winters. He talked until she gave up and let herself list into him, pressed against his side and greedily soaking up the warmth he offered. His breath hitched when her head settled against his shoulder, the slightest pause, but he kept going until the sound of his voice had almost lulled her to sleep, until he ran out of words.

“Kylo?” she asked, drowsy and confused. “Why’d you stop?”

“I thought you were asleep,” came the quiet reply.

“No,” she said, “I’m still here.” 

“You are,” he agreed.

A fuzzy thought struck her. “We are still here, right? You didn’t come back with me?”

“We’re still in my quarters.”

“Not on the _Supremacy.”_

“No, not on the _Supremacy.”_ He shifted, letting her settle more comfortably against him. “I don’t fly on ships that should be scrapped.”

She moved to poke him, but she was slow, made clumsy by the pull of sleep. He caught her hand, neatly avoiding the jab. “Was that a joke?”

“Go to sleep, Rey.”

“Fine,” she said, exhaustion already starting to drag her under. She knew better, she did, but Kylo was so warm. Maybe this was just an interlude, a break in the battle. Maybe things would be fraught and awful the next time the Force threw them together, but for the moment, she was safe. She could rest.

“I’ll stay until you’re gone,” he promised, that strange emotion back in his voice. “If you’re still here when you wake, we’ll deal with it then.”

_Where is here?_ she wanted to ask, _you never said._ But the words slipped away, Kylo and his ship fading into the cool, starry darkness of her dreams. Somehow, she heard the answer anyway. 

“The _Absolution_ ,” he said, and then he was gone.

 

—

 

She woke to sweltering heat, rough linen sheets stuck to her skin, her face mashed uncomfortably into the pillow. Rodia, then.

The bond was quiet, but she didn’t have to reach out to know Kylo was there at the other end of it, asleep in his quarters on the _Absolution._

Why had he told her? Why did he—

Rey felt heat flood her cheeks as she remembered falling asleep against him, plastered to his side and dismissing it as practical because he was _warm._ She groaned, embarrassed. He must not have had a problem with it, though. After all, he sat there and let it happen.

_Go to sleep, Rey._

And she had, easy as that. Now, the heavy exhaustion she’d been fighting for weeks was gone, her bones no longer lined with lead. 

Rest hadn’t done her any good after Ilum. After Comra. She’d come back with the saberstaff holstered at her hip, new and familiar and deadly, and flung herself headlong into the mission rotation. The Resistance was slowly carving out a foothold in the wake of the First Order’s relentless advance. Leia’s networks of spies and saboteurs and thieves were spread out across the galaxy, recruiting allies and setting up whisper networks where they could, and spreading chaos where they couldn’t. It was an ugly way to fight, but it gave Rey plenty to do. A Jedi—even one making it up as she went along—with a lightsaber and a fast ship inevitably tipped the odds in the rebels’ favor. From escort missions to outright combat, there was no shortage of work. 

She’d worked herself ragged trying to outrun the confusion in her heart, the hollowness Kylo always left behind. She thought she’d put an end to it on Lothal, seen Ben Solo for a lie and shut him out for good, but…

The terrible loneliness in his eyes as he looked at her, fixed and unchanging against the backdrop of a dozen planets, a blur of stars. The awful silence of the bond when he vanished. His voice, low and deep on the words of the poem, soft as he wove a lullaby from his memories, hoarse as he sent her to Ilum. She wouldn’t have a lightsaber without him. 

Without him, she wouldn’t need one. 

She should hate him. The rest of the galaxy certainly did. A blade through his father’s heart, the destruction of everything his mother and uncle held dear, her own personal betrayals. Countless other crimes, all the evidence in the world, and somehow it wasn’t that simple. It felt— wrong. Something in him called to something in her, unexpected but undeniably real. Ben or Kylo, whatever name she called him by, he was no longer just a creature in a mask. Enemy, yes, but also her equal. Supreme Leader, but also the man who held her hand in the dark. 

It was difficult to reconcile _Jedi Killer_ with the gentleness he’d shown her last night, the way he wielded truth as both a weapon and a gift. The way the light she’d seen in him had failed when she needed it most with why it existed at all.

She wanted to reach out across the bond and ask him—beg him—for an answer. Like so many things with Kylo, _want_ was the problem.

Instead, she hauled herself out of bed, wincing as the sheets pulled away from her skin. A moment to straighten her clothes and throw on her boots, and then she was out the door, lightsaber in hand. She needed to try and meditate on Kylo, but that was a problem that would have to wait. Right now, she needed to move.

 

—

 

She was on Denon when she saw him next.

The ecumenopolis was— impossible. The concept wasn’t new—even scavenger girls knew about city worlds, places they could only dream of escaping to one day—but the reality of it was beyond overwhelming. It was too big, too loud, too crowded. Tourists, vendors, speeders, buildings stabbing into the sky like an endless forest of needles, a thousand thousand languages and people and species all jostling for each precious sliver of space. The entire planet _buzzed_ in the Force, a high droning whine that made her whole body strangely numb. 

“Well,” Kylo said, the barest hint of humor in his tone, “I think this rules out a visit to Coruscant.”

She winced, trying to muscle past an aggressive fruit seller as she made her way along one of the smaller avenues. “It can’t possibly be any worse.”

“I beg to differ.”

“No, no,” she said, pushing away an offering of jogan fruit. “No thank you, I had enough of that on Rodia.”

“You could just mind trick him and be done with it.” 

It was hard to glare at Kylo and fend off the fruit, but she managed. “That’s not exactly an option.”

“Why not?” Somehow, he was having an easier time navigating through the crowd than she was. “You certainly had no compunction doing it to poor JB-0076.”

“That was different,” she shot back. “He was an enemy.”

“Ah,” he said, voice strangely neutral. “Simple.”

“What do you mean?” Preoccupied, she got careless with her strength. Jogan fruit splattered to the ground, sticky and purple and cloyingly sweet. She shoved a credit chip at the man before he could react, stepping away hastily as everyone around her stopped to avoid the mess. 

Kylo ignored it. 

“Enemies, allies. Is it truly that black and white?” he asked. Tinges of emotion curled through the bond: resignation, wariness. His words carried traces of the same internal battle she’d been fighting since she woke up back on Rodia. From his tone, it was a fight neither of them seemed to be winning.

“You know it’s not.”

“So where does that leave us?” He kept pace alongside her, shortening his strides to match hers as they moved toward an emptier side street. She couldn’t tell whether it was politeness or practicality. Whatever the reason, she didn’t mind. His ridiculous cloak brushed against her as they walked, a heavier fabric than his tunic. It was a useless detail, but she couldn’t make herself ignore it. 

She slowed, coming to a halt near a broken credit machine. It was a quiet spot in all the chaos; Denon still buzzed painfully in the Force, but the hustle and din of the crowd was muted. People streamed by, hurrying past without pause, headed for shops and bars and credit machines that still worked. 

Kylo stopped with her, dark eyes fixed on hers. For all that she could read his face, sense him in the bond, he was a catalogue of unknowns. A stretch of stars begging to be charted. Cloth and smile and scars, all the little things she collected and stowed carefully in some corner of her heart, were insignificant in the face of their separate realities. She wanted them anyway. 

_And yet._

That was the heart of it, right there. For every reason keeping them apart, there was another drawing them together. 

It was one thing to dismiss the bond when she thought it was a remnant of Snoke’s treachery, but now? The Force itself was connecting them— how could she keep ignoring that?

She made a choice on Lothal, and at the time, it had seemed like the right one. But that was before he spent months haunting the edges of every landscape she visited, before kaiburr, before the wrenching silence of the bond as it went dark. They’d shut each other out in turns, and each time the result was pain. 

Pain was a warning: _something is wrong. Something is going to break._

Distance, silence, the endless cycle of unintentional betrayal— it had to stop. She’d reached out a hand once before, and he’d met her halfway. She could do it again. 

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “By all rights we should be enemies, but this—” she trailed off, waving a hand between them. “This makes it impossible.” Perhaps it was cheating to let the bond fill in the rest, but she did it anyway: a brush of wary, tentative hope that found its match in Kylo. 

For a moment, the fleeting space between heartbeats, the Force smoothed out around them, wrapping them both in a deep, silver-dark peace. Tangled briefly in ribbons of starlight, she felt her worry and confusion just— fall away. The gentleness ebbed, but the calm remained. 

Kylo felt it too. “No more silence,” he said, holding her gaze with his own. She could hear Chandrila in his voice, soft, almost wistful, the same elegant lilt that had crept into his words on the _Absolution._

Her response was easy, hesitation banked, doubt put aside. One more try. 

“No more silence.”

 

—

 

After:

 

Curled up in the _Falcon’s_ cockpit, waiting for the three droid brains to quit squabbling amongst themselves and decide on a nav course—

“What’s so funny about Dagobah?” She could still hear Chewie’s joke, a low growl that made everyone laugh as they hurtled away from Crait. 

Kylo’s face twisted into a grimace. “I have it on good authority that it’s a muggy, deserted hellswamp, once home to a little green troll who spoke only in riddles.”

“Sounds unpleasant.”

“Indeed.”

“Maybe it’s only funny if you don’t have to visit?”

The grimace softened, turning into something that wasn’t a smile, not quite. It might have been, in some other life. 

“You’re probably right.”

 

_and:_

 

Lurking in a dim cantina on Nar Shaddaa, the awful, cutting harshness of the moon’s Force signature held at bay with three glasses of heady Dolomar spice wine—

“I didn’t expect to see you on a city world again.” He kept his voice low, pitched just under the hum of illicit conversation, slouching into the seat next to her with an ease that didn’t seem at all feigned.

“Don’t remind me. I wouldn’t be here if we had any other options,” she groused, wincing as she downed another swallow of wine. It burned, a cascade of fire that somehow still managed to taste vaguely of plum. “It’s not as if we could send your mother into Hutt Space. You know what they call her, don’t you?”

If they weren’t holed up in a seedy bar, a place where attention could get you killed, she thought he might have gaped. Instead, he slanted a startled glance at her. “Are you...drunk?” 

She snorted. “No. It’s just to dull the nastiness.” Another swallow. “And— bad memories.”

“Well,” he said, as if he’d come to some sort of decision. “No need to drink alone.” He got up from the table and strode to the bar. It was a strong connection this time, if he was solid and visible enough to be seen outside the bond. She hadn’t noticed at first, too caught by the burn of the spice wine to pay attention to the strength of the link. Maybe her head was a little fuzzier than she thought.

A hushed conversation and a stack of credit chips later, he came back with an empty glass and a small bottle of deep amber liquor. He splashed some into the glass, oddly careless, and tossed it back. Wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, he caught her looking at the bottle.

“Corellian whiskey? It smells like rhydonium.”

“Wrong color,” he shot back. “But you knew that. This particular vintage is something of an acquired taste.” He threw back another haphazard glass, the carelessness pricking at her. “There,” he said, “now we’re both making stupid choices.”

She choked on a laugh. “Dolomar spice wine isn’t nearly as stupid as something that could double as starship fuel.” Even the memory of rhydonium fumes made her lungs ache.

He caught the memory as it slid across her mind, caustic and sharp. When he spoke again, there was no judgment. “Did you try to salvage some of it?”

“No,” she said. “I was never that desperate. It eats right through you, and all the containment drums were gone by the time I was old enough to make it that far into a wreck.” It was only half a lie; she’d never gone after the rhydonium, but only because she’d seen what it did to other hard-luck scavengers. Hideous fuel burns, skin dissolved away to reveal strands of stringy, damaged muscle, fingers that ended at the knuckle or were missing altogether. Oily slicks in some of the deeper fuel leaks, smears of fat and fragments of pitted bone that used to be a person. 

Jakku made you desperate—no cure for that—but you couldn’t let it make you stupid. 

“You made it out.” The words were quiet, a little rough with the bite of the whiskey. “You never have to go back.” 

He was right. She’d never have to see Jakku again, never have to stand in silence while Plutt smiled and decided whether or not she’d go to sleep hungry, never hide in the belly of a rusted-out walker and pray it would hold against the howling lash of the wind, but that didn’t matter at all. Here she was, in limbo on a world that hauled those memories to the surface. The Smuggler’s Moon didn’t look a thing like Jakku, but beneath the grating scream of its Force signature, it reeked of the same desperation. Nar Shaddaa welcomed the poor and the hopeless, and kept them that way. The Hutts and the smaller crime bosses lived like kings while everyone else scrabbled for what remained, fighting over scraps, eking out a living or dying in the attempt. 

She hated it.

She didn’t want to keep talking, didn’t want to keep thinking. He let her be. They sat silently for a while, Kylo sipping his whiskey and Rey nursing a fourth and final glass of wine. She was used to the burn of it now, the fire softening into a bouquet of purple fruit and warm, sweet spices. She couldn’t have imagined enjoying it when she took her first gulp. Maybe that was what he meant by an acquired taste. 

The cantina never quite emptied out, but as first one hour, then two dragged by, other patrons left, staggering into the streets until the hum of conversation died away and just a handful of customers remained. She was almost tempted to take advantage of the new privacy and ask him for another story, something new to pull her out of the fog of the past—

The idea gave her pause. She thought he’d just been struggling for something to say, grabbing the first thing that came to mind to ease the awkward silence, but maybe it wasn’t that at all. He’d reached into his own painful history and given her a gift with Chandrila, a dream of green to hold against the memory of the desert. He’d been inside her mind, combed through the lonely, wind-scoured emptiness of her childhood; he must have known. 

_Kylo—_

_Don’t_ , came the reply, the bond wide open and burning between them, biting as the whiskey, warm as the spice wine. _All I did was balance the scales._

It was more than that, but she didn’t push. Instead, she nudged his shoulder, gratitude conveyed in the only way he could accept it; silent, swift, laden with meaning. 

The conversation lapsed after that, quiet overtaking them once more, until she had to leave. Kylo stayed at the table as she stood up, apparently content to wait out the visit with the rest of the whiskey. 

“Alright,” she said, at a loss for what to say. Goodbye? Hope the bond doesn’t drag you along for the ride? She was turning to go when he spoke up. 

“Stay away from Sector 70. Whatever you’re here for, it isn’t worth getting killed.” 

“Sector 70?”

There were shadows under his eyes as he met her gaze, a galaxy’s worth of pain. She sensed it a moment before he said it, the images hazy the way old memories always were, but clear all the same. A splash of Corellian whiskey in a dubiously clean glass, the throaty roar of a freshly rebuilt hyperdrive. Engine grease on an old white shirt. The familiar cadence of a voice as it narrated story after story, legends taking shape in the darkness of a childhood bedroom: 

“Before—” Kylo said. “Before I knew any better, I wanted to be a pilot.”

 

_and:_

 

In an empty corridor near his quarters, Champala glittering beyond the viewport like a firegem set against an endless field of stars, shades of purple and red veining the planet like a heart—

“The scar,” she said, gesturing to her face. “You could have healed it. Bacta, better stitching, even synthflesh. Why leave it?”

“Snoke. He said scars were wells of remembered pain; a way to harness past agony, let it nurture the dark, let it fuel me in battle.” Kylo’s voice was deep and even, but the brief silence seemed to unmake him. He let out a shuddering sigh. “But that was only half the reason, a smokescreen. He wanted me to remember my failures. To know, every time I looked at myself, just how weak I truly was.”

Her mouth twisted in a grimace. “His lies didn’t save him in the end.”

“No,” Kylo said heavily. There was a faraway look in his eyes, staring into memory as though it were a mirror. 

She reached for him before she could stop herself, palm cupping his cheek, the pad of her thumb tracing the line of his scar in gentle strokes. 

“You shouldn’t have let him mark you like that.” The words were barely a whisper. 

He was silent for a heartbeat, and then—

“It’s not his mark. It’s yours.”

 

—

 

They kept talking, long conversations that spanned days and visits, a thread unspooling between them until it no longer hurt to see him, until the surge of energy that accompanied an appearance was more than just commonplace. Until, to her chagrin, she looked forward to seeing him, to the easy drift of communication across the bond, images and memories and secret, tentative hope.

She was selfish and eager, hungry beyond her control for all the things Kylo offered. Things she’d lived her whole life without, things she only had a taste of with the Resistance: company, understanding. Touch.

If Kylo was parched for mercy, Rey was starved for touch. She catalogued each moment of contact with the same fierce dedication she’d once given to shutting him out; the warmth of his hands, the brush of his shoulder against hers, the subtle difference between scar and unmarked skin. 

She’d have managed more shame if the longing were one-sided. Instead, it threaded through the bond from both sides, Kylo’s need shaped by choice instead of circumstance, but no less real for it. Helm, cowl, gloves— not a single inch of skin visible when they first met. It felt like a victory each time a piece of his armor fell away, a sweet triumph that only sharpened her own need. 

He was— familiar. Familiar enough that when she worked on the shield generator until her vision swam and she fell asleep right there in the forward cargo bay, his touch didn’t startle her, even as it tugged her out of a dream of scraped knuckles and howling winds.

“Rey.”

She made a drowsy noise. Her hips and back ached. They always did, her pallet too thin to cushion the cold durasteel floor of the downed walker. 

Another touch to her shoulder. 

“Sweetheart, that can’t be comfortable.”

“S’fine,” she mumbled, “I’m used to it.” 

“Of course you are.”

Careful hands slid under her shoulders and her knees, lifting her up. Smooth wool against her cheek. A steady heartbeat echoing in her ears. 

Kylo held her cradled against his chest, carrying her through the corridors toward her cabin as if she weighed nothing at all. _Sweetheart?_ She blinked up at him for a moment, finally awake, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze, eyes fixed firmly ahead. 

“You didn’t have to bother,” she said, a little off-kilter. There was a surreal quality to the moment, like waking from one dream only to find yourself in another. 

“My back hurt just looking at you,” he replied.

“Ahh,” she said, used to the half-hearted scorn by now. “So this is entirely selfish.”

“Of course,” he said, voice solemn. Still, he set her down as gently as he’d picked her up, quiet care written in every line of his body as he stepped back from the bed. He looked around her quarters—his father’s quarters—with something strange in his eyes. Regret? Surely it wasn’t nostalgia.

She curled into the nest of blankets, the worn fabric softer than she was expecting; Kylo wasn’t the only one who felt a little bit lost. Even without Nar Shaddaa to bring it to the surface, Jakku itched like a wound that wouldn’t heal, prickling beneath her skin, flaring with pain whenever she forgot it was there. Kylo’s wounds were different; the past haunting him was one that left a trail of wreckage across the stars, but at heart they were both just trying to survive. Different choices, different paths, but that was a truth they shared. 

The more time she spent with him, the less she fought, the more she listened, the clearer the shape of him became. Kylo Ren was her past and her pain drawn in reverse. It jarred something loose in her chest, tangling with the ever-present need to touch. Maybe she was being too presumptuous, but—

She scooted closer to the bulkhead, patting the spot beside her.

“Stay for a while?”

 

—

 

She should have realized they were approaching a tipping point. Instead:

The Force dropped her into the middle of a meeting, a handful of First Order officers arguing over numbers and data output as Kylo looked on, pinching the bridge of his nose in a futile attempt to stave off a headache. 

She stifled a laugh even though he was the only who could hear her. She should have been trying to figure out what they were discussing, weapons planning or troop movements or information gathered for future operations, but all she could think was that the bickering sounded familiar. 

Kylo quirked an eyebrow at her as she clapped a hand over her mouth, hiding a grin. The others were too busy to notice the Supreme Leader’s expression, but it made her feel sly nonetheless. 

_Just like the three brains_ , she sent to him, forgetting for a moment that though he could move through it for her sake, Kylo had no love for his father’s ship. _Always squabbling._

He didn’t smile, but she caught a brief flash of amusement through the bond before he locked it away. 

_I’m sorry—_

_Don’t be_ , he sent back. He nodded toward the angry knot of officers, one of them beyond words and gesticulating furiously. _I’m afraid to interrupt._

_Smart_ , she told him. _What’s got them so worked up?_

He flipped the pad on the table in front of him to a new screen, calling up some sort of engineering project. Schematics rolled across the screen, too quick to parse before he entered a command and the design rose up into a 3-D holomodel. It was a TIE fighter, albeit one so heavily modified that its lineage was clear only in the modular cockpit and the trailing edges of the wings. 

Rey moved closed, fascinated. Enemy design or not, the ship was incredible. The TIE Silencer: an advanced prototype, fitted with a powerful hyperdrive, a shield generator, and packed with cutting-edge stealth tech so new that some of it was difficult to identify. The centerpiece of the design was an adaptive onboard computer, programmed to learn, predict, and enhance its pilot’s flying style. 

The numbers parading across the room’s main holo projection were flight logs, meticulous records detailing everything from minor issues with the control systems to a recurring power irregularity. A cursory glance told her that was the source of the yelling: the Silencer’s computer was increasing engine thrust at critical moments, not only hampering the ship’s maneuverability but also putting enormous torsional stress on the frame as it tried to cope with the unexpected acceleration. 

“Are you seeing those numbers? We’re going to have to scrap the whole kriffing computer and start from scratch.” 

“That’s not an option. Even if it were, have fun explaining it to the engineers at Sienar-Jaemus.”

“Oh please, those nerf-herders wouldn’t know an adaptive system if it bit them in the ass—”

“And you think you could do any better? So far all you’ve done is whine! ‘Torsion this, torsion that.’ You’re happy to complain, but I don’t hear you offering any groundbreaking suggestions.”

“Anything I come up with would be a damn sight better than this! At the very least, I wouldn’t have to explain why the ship broke apart and the Supreme Leader died because his lungs exploded during depressurization.”

“Only a moron would hold their breath in a vacuum.”

“Did you just call the Supreme Leader a moron—”

“Would the two of you _shut up_ ,” a third engineer hissed, looking nervously in Kylo’s direction. 

_I already have these idiots to deal with_ , he said through the bond, mental voice dry as dust. _Please don’t give them any ideas._

Rey couldn’t help it. Ship schematics, stealth technology, the connection with SJFS— it all slipped away. Resistance be damned, all she could do was laugh, startled joy fizzing through her veins. It arced from her mind to his and back again, warm and golden. A hint of a grin kicked up the corner of his mouth, and oh, _oh—_

It was the first time she’d ever seen him smile like that.

 

—

 

When did she start cataloguing his smiles? When did making him laugh begin to eclipse her duty to the rest of the galaxy?

When did he crawl into her heart? Not the bond, not the dream of Ben Solo, but _Kylo—_ Supreme Leader Ren, who shattered her hopes and then offered to pick up the pieces, as if he hadn’t done the breaking in the first place. How had she let that happen, why hadn’t she noticed—

She didn’t know.

The Resistance needed intel. That intel could kill him.

Alone on the _Falcon_ , hiding in the ruins of Anaxes, she held her encrypted comm in one hand and tried not the think about the lives she held in the other.

 

—

 

She worked herself through a series of moves, long sweeping arcs of her staff that flowed into sharp stabs and furious blocks, a sequence the Jedi texts told her was properly called a kata. It loosened the muscles and focused the mind, preparing body and spirit both for combat.

_An adherent must be ready._

_They must let doubt fall away like a stone. Battle is a crucible, a forge that burns the heart; fight, or die. They must never seek war, but always be ready to face it. Life is precious; look first to preserve it. Only then may the blade bring death. They must kill, and live with the consequences._

_An adherent must be ready._

Maybe that worked for the Jedi, for warriors who spent their lives emptying themselves of everything but the will of the Force. Maybe the texts were full of bantha shit.

She’d emptied everything out of one of the cargo bays and let her saber flare to life, breathing deep and trying to let the doubt fall away. It hadn’t happened yet, and likely wouldn’t. Still, she ran through the kata again and again, over and over until she lost track of time. Sweat slicked her muscles and dripped into her eyes, a salt sting she welcomed: sweat meant it wasn’t tears. Stars, she knew better. No matter how badly she wanted something, no matter how much every fiber of her heart longed for it, ached for it, she should have known she could never have it. The universe gave no gift without price. 

Dreams were spinebarrels— you couldn’t hold them without risking blood. She’d been a fool to forget that. 

Kylo Ren was the Supreme Leader of the First Order. He was her enemy, no matter how fiercely she wanted to deny it, to dismiss that truth and bury it like wreckage in the sand, forgotten and ignored. He led an empire, a monstrous machine that churned through the galaxy, spreading order at the cost of freedom. It was a regime soaked in blood; she couldn’t pretend that away.

There was more at stake than her dreams, than the endless touch-hunger that turned her bones hollow with want. Finn, Poe, Chewie. _Leia._ The Resistance was risking everything to push back against the First Order, to bring freedom and hope to people in darkness. To people like the girl she’d been, starving and desperate and alone. Maybe Rey from nowhere could gamble on Kylo Ren, but the Resistance couldn’t afford to. 

Hadn’t she wanted simplicity? There it was. 

And yet— 

She _knew_ Kylo. The shape and feel of him, the way he breathed and the quiet huff of his laugh and the smell of his skin. The dry sharpness of his humor, what it took to coax a smile from him. _Stars_ , she wanted to cry, _I’ve woken up in his arms. Please don’t make me give this up._

The Force might be connecting them, but it couldn’t change who they were. Whatever the reason, their feelings didn’t matter; they were pawns, bound by their own choices and the stark reality of war.

At the heart of her blade, the kyber sang a discordant note, a sound of frustrated agony that could have come from her own throat. She stumbled, missing a step of the kata, but forced herself to keep going. A vision of Kylo’s saber rose in her mind, the same way it had when she built the staff. 

_A blade that screamed instead of sang_. Now, the truth of that thought was sharp enough to make her bleed. His lightsaber was a howl, a wretched, furious cry that scythed into the softness behind her ribs, a pain like the hook of the bond, magnified and made infinitely worse. 

She thought of the quillons, the cracked housing, the crudeness of the external wiring. Was that the saber Luke helped him build? Had it ever glowed a different color? Ever sung with hymns of joy instead of rage?

She didn’t know, and now— 

Now she never would.

 

—

 

Late that night, the bond shuddered and stirred.

She woke from a dream of Jakku, _sixty portions for the droid_. Enough to stave off all her hunger, enough to take her from the ragged edge of survival to something like comfort, and still she’d said no. It wasn’t right. 

She woke from a dream of them fighting side by side, back to back, his body solid against hers, the Force singing with the _rightness_ of it, enough to make her cry, enough to make her ache. 

A little more time, that was all she wanted. It was impossible, but she wanted it anyway: a license to be greedy, just once more, without the shadow of guilt hanging over her. The bond keened at the thought, skeins of want tangling up beneath her skin, surging through her and making her careless. The dream came back to her: the familiar shape of him, the way he moved, the warmth of his skin. A dull emptiness throbbed between her legs, an echo of the sharper pang in her chest.

The night was silent around her. Maybe she was still dreaming. Surely, what she did in dreams couldn’t be held against her. The bond, the Force, they both sang, high and needy, urging her on, and she wanted to, she _wanted_ so badly. What purpose did restraint serve? 

She trailed her fingers across her hips, slow, almost hesitant, until goosebumps broke out across her skin. Clumsy and a little unsure, she slipped them between her thighs, pressing into the ache. There was no time for this on Jakku— only the awful, endless work of survival. No chance to learn her body like this, alone in the darkness. No desire to learn it with another as she’d seen some of the truly destitute do at Niima. 

She pushed the thought aside, focusing on the warm tide of sensation starting to roll through her, a slow, deep build. It stayed like that until she brushed against a spot that sent an electric jolt through her, lightning crackling through her blood. 

It was like white fire in her mind, blotting out everything except _more_ and _now_ , the fluttering ache now a razor’s edge of need. She could barely think through it, except to circle over that small nub, gasping for breath as heat spiralled through her, building, building—

—until it plateaued, leaving her stuck on some precipice, something huge and blinding waiting just out of her reach. She whined, rolling her hips against her hand, desperate, trying to will herself there. It was no use. She was a ship caught in the climb, close enough to touch the stars but still so far away, held fast by the weight and pull of gravity. 

_Please, please—_

She didn’t know who she was pleading with—the Force, the bond, her own body—but it was Kylo who answered, sleepy and distant. She could have cried, but then his mind was right there with her, disbelief radiating down the bond. Before she could even think to cringe away, the disbelief was followed by a shocked, almost delirious desire. He wanted this too.

She was nothing but sensation, nerves stretched taut and begging for release. Through the haze of need, she could feel Kylo through the bond, fumbling with the blankets and the loose ties of his pants, as frantic as she was. He wrapped a hand around himself, palm huge and just slightly rough, a phantom rasp of callus on skin. The connection between them was a vast, infinite thing, a direct line from her heart to his. It was the feedback loop again, pleasure this time instead of pain, both of them feeling every touch, every bolt of heat—

And then she was over the edge, tumbling through freefall, blind to everything except the exquisite burst of feeling rolling through her. Dimly, she heard Kylo choke back a gasp, his hand working desperately now, and then he was chanting her name, _Rey, Rey, Rey—_

The bond stayed open, thrumming with contentment as she lay shivering in the aftermath. The dreamlike quiet that made her so bold was still there, but there was a hint of vulnerability now, a creeping sense that she’d done something irrevocable. 

Kylo picked up on it, mental voice tentative as he sent a question through the bond. _Are you okay?_ Then, barely a whisper: _do you want me to go?_

_No_ , she sent back immediately, brushing away the tendrils of fear. _Stay. I’m fine. Please, just— stay._

_Alright._

The connection stayed open between them until she fell asleep once more. The last thing she remembered was wrapping herself in her blankets, chilled and still trembling faintly, wishing he were there. She’d already been so greedy— what was one more wish? She wanted to curl up against him, head over his heartbeat, revelling in the solid warmth of his body. She wanted to tell him she cared. She wanted to tell him she was sorry. 

A wave of melancholy chased her back into her dreams. When she woke, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember which one of them it came from.

 

—

 

She’d already made the decision.

The knowledge was what fed the guilt, dogging her across the stars no matter how fast or how far she flew. It was an ugly seed in her heart, an insistent voice that kept whispering that she’d made a mistake. It trellised through her, vines choking her lungs and wrapping strangling coils around her throat: _mistake, mistake, mistake._

Some days, the voice sounded like Leia, disapproval ringing in her tone. You’ve put the Resistance at risk, you’ve given in to the dark—

Others, it was Snoke’s; raspy, condescending, deeply amused. You blundered straight into a trap you knew was there. Half-trained little fool, playing at being a Jedi—

The worst was Kylo. Bruised, shattered, something dead in his voice when spoke. I trusted you, Rey. I trusted you—

There had to be a way to end it. Some clear solution, a way to sever the bond and staunch the bleeding. To smother the guilt. There had to be, because she couldn’t keep going like this. _Kylo_ couldn’t keep going like this, caught unawares in the net of her selfishness. Giving the bond a second chance was meant to end the betrayals, not add to them, but that was exactly what she’d done. 

Rey wasn’t always sure how to act around people. _Desert rat_ wasn’t a kind epithet, but it was a true one. The complex, unspoken rules everyone else seemed to know instinctively didn’t exist on Jakku. The desert didn’t care if you were polite; how loudly you spoke, how quickly you ate, how freely you accepted touch— none of that mattered. Most of the time she didn’t let it bother her, but when she woke up with sticky thighs and a burgeoning sense of shame, even she could tell she’d made a mistake. 

He felt something for her; she knew that in her bones. The softness in his eyes when he looked at her, the way he’d let her into his memories and given her glimpses of the past he’d tried to so hard to kill. The care he took with her was stilted, unpracticed, but real as anything she’d ever known. It was there in a thousand small gestures, a steady glimmer of tenderness that she was afraid was already out of reach.

He trusted her, and she betrayed that trust.

It was bad enough that she’d planned to end the bond, decision made in the cargo bay as she cut down invisible enemies and wrestled with her own starving heart. It would have been a blow no matter what; a promise broken, the gift of tentative peace thrown back in his face. Now, in the aftermath of her dreamy, selfish greed, it was a decision that seemed unbearably cruel.

They were both lonely, hungry and desperate for each other in a way she couldn’t begin to explain. She’d given in to that need, given them both a taste of something they could never have again, all the while planning to vanish. If—when—she left, she’d leave him with nothing. Kylo wouldn’t have the static, the faint starlit connection of a shuttered bond; he would be completely alone. 

The thought of it made her sick. The hydrospanner she’d been using to tighten up a loose panel fell from nerveless fingers, clattering to the floor. She left it there, busy work forgotten, and wandered toward the galley in a haze. Half a pot of caf sat on a warming unit, hours old. The bitter aroma made her wince as she poured, the liquid splashing into the mug looking more like burnt engine oil than caf. She didn’t care; she drifted back into the _Falcon’s_ main hold, settling at the table with her hands wrapped around the warmth of the cup, trying not to think. 

A brush from Kylo’s mind. _Are you alright?_

Familiar question, familiar answer.

_Not now— busy._

Three curt words. She wanted to soften them somehow, to apologize for the betrayal she knew was coming, but she couldn’t. It was the want that had gotten her in trouble in the first place. Talking to Kylo would just make things worse. Still, she couldn’t stop herself from sending a wave of emotion across the bond, apology tinged with regret. 

That was another reason to cut the bond, one that had nothing to do with the Resistance or some half-hearted stab at Jedi ethics; she was in too deep. Leaning on the bond, drawing strength, drawing comfort from it, from Kylo— it was stupid. Inevitability, the will of the Force, her own traitorous feelings, none of it excused tying her happiness to the Supreme Leader. She should have told someone— Finn, or Chewie, maybe. Even Leia. Maybe that would have staved off the loneliness, been enough to let her keep her head. 

_Desperate, not stupid._

The thought burned, spice wine and a painful Force signature, and stars, how could she have been so blind? She’d lost sight of that rule before she ever let Kylo see the memory of it, forgotten it same way she’d forgotten that dreams drew blood. 

Severing something the Force itself had put into motion wasn’t going to be easy, but there had to be a way. She needed time to figure out how, space to research and experiment without being paralyzed by guilt. 

She needed to wall herself off from him before she changed her mind. 

Kylo had explained how he locked himself out, describing it for her one night as they tried to figure out the mechanics of the bond. The shape of the rules that bound them together still wasn’t entirely clear, but since the _Absolution_ they had both figured out how to control the strength of the connection. That part at least was simple: walls and doors.

_No more silence_ wasn’t a promise she could keep, not in the long run. Maybe it wasn’t fair of her to take advantage of how that promise had started to shape their interactions, but it was the only thing she could think to do. If she slammed the door and turned the lock, chances were Kylo would batter himself senseless trying to smash through; a wall though, something thin and obviously temporary… he’d let that stand. 

It was a betrayal wrapped in the skin of a lie. She pushed away the pain of it, the cutting thought that at the end of all this, she’d need a third tally; one for Jakku, one for each side of treachery’s coin. 

Another brush from Kylo’s mind, concerned enough to ignore her earlier dismissal. The wall couldn’t wait— it had to be now.

Pulling in a deep breath, she steadied herself. All she had to do was walk a line between controlled access and accidental isolation. Rey turned her focus inward, imagining the door, and trying to block it. It was exhausting. She didn’t _want_ to push him away, and the bond—so much deeper now than it used to be—seemed to know that. It fought her, actively resisting her efforts, bucking and straining as she worked on the foundation of her wall. The Force shrieked in her ears, a high, pained sound that echoed in her mind and left a stain behind, the psychic imprint of a bruise. 

The caf was stone cold by the time she finished. The bond still flowed between them, but it was muted now, muffled by the perimeter she’d managed to raise around the edges of her mind. It was paper thin, but solid enough to hold. She could just barely make out the sense of his mind behind the barrier, radiating shamed confusion the way Kylo himself radiated heat. 

_It’s for the best_ , she told herself firmly. _No more bleeding out into the bond, no more dreams. No more betrayal._

Her hands trembled at the lie, cup jittering between her palms, and suddenly she couldn’t stand the sight of it. Bile threatened at the back of her throat; she was full up on bitterness already. She strode back to the sink and dumped the caf down the drain. What was left in the pot followed soon after. Wasting food always made her itchy and frustrated, but the prospect of drinking the sludge made her feel sick. She watched the dregs spiral toward the drain, leaving behind a faint wash of grit that reminded her of sand. Jakku, Ogem, _Kylo—_

Repairs, Jedi meditation, even staring at the kriffing kitchen sink— none of it was working. She need to find something that could keep her mind from running in circles for more than ten minutes. She’d tie herself up in knots if she didn’t. Decision made, she headed for the cockpit. It was risky to fly like this, but she had a feeling the Unknown Regions wouldn’t let her stay distracted for long.

She was right. Forty minutes after she fired up the sublights, every ounce of her attention was on the eerie beauty of a distant nebula. A strange, pulsing light emanated from it, soft flares glowing an ethereal green and then dimming to black, regular as a heartbeat. 

Marking down the location on the rough map she’d traced out, she added a note of caution next to the coordinates. The faraway light unnerved her; even from such a distance, it felt like the whole of the Force flowed through the nebula, vast and angry and strangely dead. Every instinct she had told her to stay away. 

Those same instincts wanted to talk to Kylo, to ask if he’d ever seen anything like this, felt such a strange current in the Force. Her hand slipped, skidding across the map and into a different quadrant as the wall in her mind trembled. So much for distraction. She pushed the thought away, focusing on the nebula. 

She had the _Falcon_ skirting the edge of the Unknown Regions, ostensibly on the lookout for more hidden bases—no one wanted another Starkiller—but also combing the borders for anything unusual. Mapping such a huge expanse was an impossible task, one a single pilot couldn’t have managed even without a war going on, but Leia refused to leave the borders uncharted.

“Security,” the General had explained, a steely look on her face. “Snoke came from the Unknown Regions, and I’ll be damned if I let something else come slithering out of the darkness to destroy us. We can’t have ships out there in force, but a few trusted pilots working in shifts? That we can manage.”

Rey had volunteered for sector sweeps in the wake of her decision, restless and heartsick and trying to bury her guilt in action. She wasn’t on enforced rest anymore, but Leia kept a close eye on the mission rotation, apparently determined not to let Rey burn herself out again. The sweeps were important, but they were classified as light duty. She’d been desperate to _do_ something; if it was a mundane job that meant the General wouldn’t skewer her when she got back, so much the better. 

She was almost done with her rotation. As soon as she cleared her chunk of the sector she could report in and take a break. _Or_ , she thought with a slightly manic sense of determination, _I could save everyone some trouble and just start the next bit right now._

That sounded like a better idea than more caf she wouldn’t drink, more thoughts she couldn’t ignore. She guided the _Falcon_ away from the nebula, ignoring a sudden impulse to stop and fix her gaze on the glow once more. The path in front of the ship was clear, but the nebula had her on edge; the strange feeling, the urge to talk to Kylo— if she kept her eyes forward, it was easier to keep her thoughts focused on flying. 

She combed the border until she couldn’t see straight, clearing more than double what her sweep was expected to cover before exhaustion wrapped around her like a suffocating fog. Checking her logs one last time, she throttled back the sublights, dropping the ship into idle and then staggering to the cabin. Her head throbbed. The wall in her mind was still there, tissue thin but somehow holding steady. She collapsed onto the bed, too tired to bother with the blanket. Inch by inch, she reinforced the barrier, working until her eyes slipped shut and she fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

 

—

 

Days later, she was curled up in the cockpit, nursing a cup of weak tea and staring out at the stars when it happened. The familiar hook, reaching into her chest and tugging at her heart, pulling her toward Kylo. She didn’t fight it, just set the tea down and let the rush of power flow through her.

It was the _Absolution_ again, his quarters cold and dark. She was upright on the bed this time, but other than that, it was the same scene as before: scars, freckles, skin. He was sprawled on his back, one arm flung out to hang off the far edge of the bed, his sleep restless and uneasy. 

Shivering a little, she settled back against the wall and waited for him to wake up. “Kylo,” she said, forcing herself to speak around the knot in her throat. He frowned, sheets rustling as he shifted, but he stayed asleep. She tried again, nudging at the bond this time, the wall in her mind gone as if it had never been there at all. _Kylo._

He made a faint noise, rolling over until he faced her. His forehead came to rest against her hip, expression smoothing out as soon as he touched her. The rhythm of his breathing didn’t change; he was still asleep. 

She’d wanted to tell him goodbye, tell him— tell him _something_ before she cut the bond, but maybe it was kinder this way. A clean break instead of a ruinous, drawn-out end. She wouldn’t have to see the look on his face when he realized, hear his voice ring hollow when he accused her of betrayal. 

Maybe she was just trying to assuage her own guilt. 

_Snoke always lied_ , Kylo said in her memory, features twisted with remembered agony. _Unless the truth was worse._

She wondered which was more painful: the lie you saw coming or the one you didn’t.

His hair fell in dark waves across his face, messy with sleep. The shadows under his eyes were back, bruised, stark. He looked worn, and horribly vulnerable. She wanted to touch him so badly, to steal one last moment and keep it with her when everything was gone; it took a concerted effort of will not to reach out and stroke her fingers through his hair.

She cracked her knuckles instead, joints popping softly in the quiet. It was a startlingly normal action, something that felt like getting ready to dive into a broken engine or sort out some shorted wiring. It felt like getting ready for a fight. In a way, that’s exactly what she was doing— the Jedi texts had yielded nothing on severing a bond, but that wasn’t going to stop her. Her mind was made up; there was a certainty lining her bones, instinct telling her if she wanted to end it, it was now or never.

Kylo was still asleep. The room was oddly silent, as if the Force itself were holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do.

_I’m sorry_ , she sent to him, a wave of love and longing. She felt it wash over him, watched his hand come up as if to soothe away a pain in his chest, and then she forced herself to close her eyes. 

The bond, the Force, they both shimmered in her mind. A roar like the ocean filled her ears as she touched the thread, power thundering through her in an unstoppable rush—

Rey gathered up her courage and flung herself into the current.

 

—

 

It ripped her away from the _Absolution_ and sent her hurtling backwards through the past.

Planets and stars screamed by her, images blurring and burning like starlines outside a window. She fell through them, spice wine and hyperspace and shattered moons and tallgrass, until the flow of memory began to shudder and it was suddenly a struggle to keep moving. She pushed forward, pace slower and more arduous with every passing moment, the scenes around her carving themselves into her heart— crimson salt scars, fire drifting down like snow, the endless crash of the ocean, a forest cold enough to burn, and then—

 

—

 

Kylo Ren’s heart was a desert.

Rey opened her eyes to dust and sand and searing sun. A lonely wind skimmed across the dunes, a sound like the first stirrings of the _X’us’R’iia._ Jakku?

“No, it’s not Jakku. Easy mistake to make, though.” 

A man stood before her: tall, broad-shouldered, long waves of hair falling around his face. A scar cut across his features, thin and painful. He flickered in and out like a bad holovid image, fuzzy with age one moment, sharp the next, then distorted once more. The Force swirled in the air all around him, chaotic and wild, as if he were locked in some invisible battle. It turned solid as she watched, a mantle of darkness that flared around him, salt and ash and blood-dipped pain, nearly swallowing him whole before it burned away under the fierceness of the desert sun, sloughing off to wither away in the sand. She stared, transfixed, until she caught the last agonized rasp of it over the sound of the wind. Then silence fell, and she had no choice but to drag her gaze back to his face. 

Anakin Skywalker smiled at her, rougeish and rueful and steeped in an old, old sorrow.

“Hello, Rey.”

Instinct sent her hand to her hip, boots digging into the sand as she sank into a ready stance, lightsaber unholstered and activated before she had a chance to think about why it was in her hand instead of on the _Falcon._

“Who are you? How do I know— why are you here?”

“That’s a beautiful blade. Certainly better than my first effort. It suits you, little desert mouse.”

She ignored the twinge in her heart at the nickname, a softer version of the name Kylo had thrown at her. She was here for a purpose, not to exchange uncomfortable pleasantries with a delusional stranger. 

“Who are you?” She levelled one end of the blade at his throat. “I won’t ask a third time.”

“You know who I am.”

“No. That’s not possible.”

“What, you can handle mystical bonds and cosmic energy and green milk, but ghosts are where you draw the line?”

It wasn’t possible, and yet— there he was.

“You’re Anakin Skywalker,” she said. “Luke and Leia’s father. Kylo’s grandfather.” A cold rage was swelling in her veins, foreign knowledge burning through her like acid. “You’re— you’re Darth Vader. You’re the reason he’s half a monster, trying live up to your _legacy—_

He didn’t deny it. 

She drew in a ragged breath, bitter sadness welling up to join the rage. “You’re as bad as Snoke.”

“Worse,” he said, nothing but quiet resignation in his tone. It was heavy and familiar, an old pain worn smooth by desert winds. “And I’m here because once upon a time, I swore I was done abandoning family.”

“Fine job you’re doing,” she snapped as she lowered her saber. “He’s— he’s asked for your guidance, pleaded, begged for it for _years_ , I’ve seen it in his memories—”

“I know,” he said, remarkably calm. “And more than anything, I wish I could answer, but he wouldn’t recognize me if I did. He wants Vader, and I haven’t worn that mask in a very long time. So here I am instead, trying to protect him from himself.”

“What do you mean?”

He spread his hands, gesturing out at the endless expanse of sand and sky. She half-expected to see the looming wreck of a Star Destroyer in the distance, but the horizon was empty. 

“Look around, Rey. You know deserts, so tell me: is this the heart of someone beyond saving?”

It was a riddle that wasn’t a riddle at all. The desert was in her bones, hunger and grit and harsh lessons sunk into the very marrow of who she was. She would always know them. Deserts killed—deadly sun and choking winds and endless parched sand—but they held life, too. Spinebarrels, pushing up through rock and sand, sharp and prickly and furiously persistent. Nightbloomers hiding away until the air cooled and the moons came out, flowers turning the wind into a soft, perfumed secret when the breezes blew just right. Steelpeckers hammering away at old wrecks, pole-snakes hunting skittermice, desert rats burrowing in the dust. Ugly or beautiful or deadly, all of it was there; all of it was alive.

If this was his heart, then there was hope. But you couldn’t live on hope— she knew that firsthand. 

“It’s not enough,” she said, something like a sob tearing at her throat. “I’ve been down this road. I can’t do it again. I can’t risk the Resistance.”

“The Resistance, or your own heart?” There was no judgment in Anakin’s voice.

“Both,” she said, still fighting back the sob. She would not cry about this. She _wouldn’t._

“Go ahead,” he told her with the shadow of a grin. “We could use some rain around here.”

She swiped furiously at her cheeks, brushing away the saltwater. “I don’t see you crying.” The words were steadier than they had any right to be.

“I’d conjure up an ocean if I thought it would help,” he said. “But mostly I talk. I’ve never been very good with words, but I have plenty of stories. They work well enough for tinder.”

A memory: a dark room, two masks. Kylo on his knees, afraid and praying. _Forgive me. I feel it again._

“The pull to the light.”

He nodded. “You’re a quick one.” He folded his hands into his sleeves, looking suddenly smug. “I can see why he likes you.” 

Force, her cheeks were on fire, red and almost painfully hot, like she’d been out in the sun for hours without any cover. “What?”

“Sorry,” he said cheerfully, very clearly not sorry at all, “but someone has to embarrass you kids. My wayward son isn’t around, and my daughter is busy fighting another war, so the duty falls to me.” He sobered at the mention of the war, the cloak of his good humor falling away. For a moment she could see the fire burning in his heart— Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight; Darth Vader, scourge of the Jedi. 

Again, a memory: shivering and exhausted on the _Absolution_ , thoughts whirling— the island, the cave, black, white, _darkness rises, and light to meet it—_

Balance, but _how?_ Ilum’s shattered moons, a lightsaber split in half, a thread between two distant hearts. Mirrors and binaries, always, endlessly; the Force wasn’t subtle but it wasn’t clear, either.

He seemed to know what she was thinking. “‘All is as the Force wills is.’ Did you stumble across that particular saying in those moldy old books? It’s bantha shit. If things were the way the Force wanted them, we wouldn’t be here, having this conversation. The Force wants balance because that’s the nature of energy.”

“So the war—”

“—is the mess you get when a cosmic energy tries to play human.” That old sorrow was back, sharpened by helpless fury. “It’s not very good at it.”

The rage in his voice was enough to make her tighten her grip on the saberstaff. “That sounds personal.”

“It is personal,” he said. “Two damn wars worth of personal. That pretty mosaic you keep picturing? That was the dream of the Jedi: a galaxy in balance, and that same balance reflected in the galaxy’s peacekeepers.” The rage had not abated, but he’d leashed it, wrestled his tone into something distant and impassive. “But they lost sight of the balance, started repressing anything that touched the dark, and the Force has been screaming ever since.”

She could see the shape of it, centuries of history and politics and theology crashing into each other until they were indistinguishable, enemies more obvious than answers. If she thought back through the tangled skeins of Aurebesh, she could see that change reflected in the Jedi texts themselves; the slow creep of fear into the writings, the glacial shift of philosophy set down in endless lines of crabbed, spidery text. Still—

“Screaming?”

“The Sith rose to counter them. Set the stage with two opposing philosophies, each one bent on destroying the other, and balance becomes a pipe dream.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that struggle a balance in and of itself?”

“Not a good one. Eventually, every war has a victor. When the Jedi won, the imbalance persisted. Deepened. They spent centuries trying to puzzle out why, trying to scry into the future, and all the while, the Force kept screaming. In the end, all they managed to come up with was a scrap of prophecy.” His smile was ash and char, the sulfurous reek of poison. “And me.” 

Anakin, Vader. Two sides of the same coin; a single, terrible whole. 

Images poured into her skull, sudden and violent. “You,” she said, her horror impossible to disguise.

“I was the Chosen One,” he continued, implacable. “The Force’s attempt at direct intervention. I was always meant to bring balance, one way or another.”

She recoiled, sickened, furious. As she brought her blade up once more, the same fierce blue as the sky above her, the wind turned to sound. She could hear the echo of Temple younglings, laughter turned to screams as heavy boots advanced across ancient flagstones, a chorus of doom and slaughter. 

“Murdering children isn’t balance,” she spat, the words like bile.

“The Force isn’t human. It doesn’t care.”

“But _you_ were—”

“And that’s the tragedy of it.” Something about the phrase made him look away. When he met her gaze again, the old sorrow wasn’t old at all, awful and raw and impossibly fresh. “I was, mostly. I had friends, a mentor, a woman I loved. Hell, I dreamed of freeing the slaves. None of it mattered at all. The Force wanted change, and the Jedi refused. I was caught in the middle, tearing apart at the seams.”

“So, what? You’re not to blame for your crimes?”

“Just the opposite,” he said. “I’ll never be free of the stain. The mercy I’ve been shown is a gift I don’t deserve. But the why of it, that matters. Keep putting pressure on something for long enough, and eventually it will rupture. I lasted twenty-three years. My grandson lasted nineteen. Each time, the Jedi and the Republic were collateral damage.” 

Her hands ached, knuckles white as she gripped the hilt, metal digging into her palms as the blade burned. “Why are you telling me this? You know this isn’t why I’m here.”

He had to know she’d come to sever the bond. Apparently, he didn’t care.

“Because the Force _isn’t human._ It will keep doing this, over and over and over again, until it’s happy with the balance. I made my choices. You’ll make yours. Nothing can change that. But if the galaxy understands why this isn’t working— if _you_ understand— maybe it doesn’t have to end in tragedy this time.”

Her vision blurred as she deactivated the blade, holstering it with nerveless fingers. It hurt, pulling the words up from her chest, but she did it anyway. “I can’t save him.”

“I know,” he said simply, embers now instead of flame. “Only he can do that.”

She sucked in a shaky breath, trying to steady herself. “Then what good does knowing do? Will—”

—the rest of her words were lost in a howl of wind, Anakin’s grim expression the last thing Rey saw before pain exploded behind her heart and the world turned black.

 

—

 

His hair slid through her fingers like water as he wrenched away.

She reached out for him, an instinct she couldn’t suppress. Kylo didn’t seem to notice, staring at her in shock as a terrible sort of comprehension started to dawn on his face. The bond keened, shuddering, and the Force—

The Force was screaming. She could hear it now, clear as a kyber hymn, clear as Kylo’s voice as he gasped out her name, tentative, hoarse, layered with a fragile hope that shattered into fury when she finally met his gaze. 

“You wanted to sever the bond,” he said, pain in every syllable, every breath. “You were going to, I could feel it—”

He stopped, waiting for her to deny it. The silence was charged, heavy and thick like the air before a storm. 

“I had to try,” she said. She didn’t know what he’d felt, what he’d seen, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to make him understand. “I’m so sorry, Kylo, I had to—”

“No,” he snarled, “you didn’t. You didn’t have to do any of it! The scheming, the silence, the _lies._ You lied to me,” he said, and it sounded like a question, like a crime; a betrayal so brutal it left him at a loss.

_Which is more painful: the lie you see coming or the one you don’t?_

The thought rang across the bond. On the heels of it came the memory of his expression as he leaned into her hip, soothed by her touch as she tried to muster up the strength to rip them apart. She didn’t mean to conjure it, but it flowed out of her heart anyway, seeping into the bond where it hung between them like an angry ghost, all shadow and regret. 

For a moment, the world was very still. Then a sour darkness began to spread through the room, growing sharper as Kylo pushed away from her, stumbling off the mattress as if he couldn’t stand be near her. Clumsy and careless with rage, he tripped over the trailing edges of the blanket, nearly falling before he steadied himself with a vicious grab at the Force, a lash of power that scalded her as it rushed by. 

“You said you were fine,” he flung at her, anger almost enough to cover the jagged edges in his voice. “Not now, and busy, and fine, lies on top of excuses, and you asked me to _stay—_

He broke off, his jaw working as he tried to fight back a surge of disgust, black and acid, eating away at his heart as more sour darkness billowed through the Force, wound through the bond like blood. It was too much— the emotions rolled over her in a suffocating fog, betrayal laced with grief, and anger, so much anger, enough to make her choke. It rattled through her chest, the phantom echo of Kylo’s pain like the thud of another heart, both of them bleeding. 

“You let me feel you,” he said helplessly, “and all along you were planning to leave.”

She closed her eyes against the accusation, but it was too late: his face was already seared into her memory, floating behind her eyelids, vivid and damning. The scar cutting across his cheek, pale against pale, hers even now—

Even now, she wanted to touch him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she said. “But we can’t— we can’t do this anymore.”

“Why?” It was a demand that fell closer to a plea. _Tell me why, Rey, why are you doing this—_

“We’re on opposite sides of a war! We can’t be connected like this. It’s stupid, it’s a security risk—”

“I don’t care! You didn’t care either, what’s changed—”

She darted across the bed, grabbing his hand when he made no move to back away. Warm, huge, trembling slightly; she held his palm over her heart. It beat wildly beneath his touch, thudding painfully against her ribs. 

“It hurts!” she burst out, dangerously close to tears. “I ache when you’re not here. I trust you when I know I shouldn’t, I’ve kept you secret from everyone else who matters to me, and it just— hurts.” She swallowed, trying to keep her voice steady. It didn’t work. “I keep hoping you’ll come back when I know you won’t,” she said, tightening her grip on his hand. Any second, he’d pull away. She clung to him as she forced herself to say the rest of it, words shaky and rushed and impossible to call back. “And I can’t do it anymore. It’s tearing me apart.”

For one heartbeat, two, neither of them moved. His hand stayed over her heart; she searched his face, waiting.

He yanked his hand from her grip. When he stepped back this time, it was deliberate. Measured. His fingers were curled into a fist now, hand shaking like he want to hit something, but the rest of him was utterly still. 

Tears slipped hot down her face. “Kylo—”

“Don’t,” he said, very quietly.

“I’m sorry.” 

The Force was still shrieking, a high, thready sound that made her want to give in and sob. Still, she heard it: the empty space where he almost said please. He’d begged her before, hadn’t he? Hand open, reaching for her through the fire and the ash, heedless of the bodies. Heedless of the cost. 

Somehow, this was worse. 

“I’ll fight it,” he said. He wouldn’t beg this time. _I’ll fight you._

_I know._

She was crying openly now, hiccupping sobs that got worse as he turned away, headed for the door. They both gasped when a tether pulled him up short, the two of them chained together like dogs. She could feel him hacking at it, but it was no use. Finally, he gave up. Eyes wild, he stalked back toward the bed until the chain fell slack once more, settling down with as much space between them as the mattress would allow. His hand was trembling again.

Rey looked away, pulling her knees to her chest. The scream finally died away, leaving them in miserable silence. It was difficult to ignore the familiar texture of the blanket, the way the chill cut through her without Kylo’s warmth to hold it at bay. Chandrila was a faraway dream, too soft, too green to be real. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she tried to shut away the memories. Her bones felt hollow; she was a flimsy anchor against the tide of pain sweeping through the room, but she’d already fought this battle, already made this choice. All she had to do was stick to it. 

All she had to do was let go.

 

—

 

_After:_

 

They dreamed. 

Confused darkness— the cold sweat of fear dripping down her back— the memory of lightning, all twisting agony as it arced through—

Rusted metal, the creak and groan of it echoing in the hollow silence of dead giant, plucking out wire sinew and scraps of bone and still always starving— a stitch of black winding through his thoughts, the choking shame of too much too much too much—

 

_and:_

 

An old room with the woodsy, citrus scent of balmgrass, the lonely cry of a hunting bird, over and over until it sounded like screaming, until it sounded like weeping— silence and a dead silver moon, cold enough to shiver, cold enough to cry, the lonely sere and bone harshness of the desert at night—

Blue and red burning on the shadow of snow, dark eyes and darker heart, a forest splitting in two—

 

_and:_

 

A hand reaching out— gentle pressure, cheek burning with the touch— a word torn away on the wind, lost in the angry crash of the ocean— 

Voices, oily and slick and horribly familiar— portions— heir— 

—this is all you’ll ever be.

 

—

 

She rendezvoused with the Resistance at an abandoned Separatist outpost near Castell.

Heart in tatters after her failed attempt to sever the bond, head spinning with Anakin’s revelations, she’d plugged the coordinates into the navicomputer as soon as she got them, blasting away from the Unknown Regions at full speed. She wasn’t sure what to expect when she dropped out of hyperspace, starlines fading to black as the ship slowed and the sublights came online, but it certainly wasn’t what she found. 

There was little traffic in the sector, the outpost far enough away from Castell that the stream of commercial vessels headed for the planet never came near the old facility; the whole thing appeared deserted, just a chunk of rock with a few buildings and an outdated bioshield. She set the _Falcon_ down next to something that looked like it might once have been a hangar. The air boiled with dust as she made her way down the ramp, stinging her eyes and making her cough. The thick clouds kicked up from her landing were just starting to settle when a command shuttle touched down behind her, sending more grit into the air. 

She headed for the craft, heedless of the dust and the noise. Leia was there to greet her when the doors hissed open, a knowing look on her face. 

“Come on inside, honey,” she said. “We have a lot to talk about.” 

The interior of the base was a hive of activity, the emptiness outside merely a front. Leia swept by computer terminals and holomaps, her days with a cane a thing of the past. Rey trailed along in her wake, exhausted and numb.

She’d made the right choice. She had. Even through the haze of detached pain, she was knew that. What other choice could she have made? Hamstrung by piecemeal information, pressured by the war, she’d tried to do the only thing she could think to do. There was no reason to dread a conversation with Leia, no reason to feel like she was walking toward an interrogation. She hadn’t even done it, in the end. Anakin burned up all her time, and then Kylo— 

The bond was still in place, shuttered as tightly as she’d ever felt it, but intact nonetheless. Still, when Leia finally came to a halt in what looked like a little-used meeting room, Rey had to work to meet her gaze.

“So,” Leia said, the word laced with some emotion Rey was too tired to parse. “Something happened.”

There was no point in lying. “Yes.”

“I thought so,” the General said. “Your Force signature is just about as torn up as your expression. Whatever it was, it was bad. That much is easy to tell.”

She paled, trying to figure out how to explain, where to even start. “I didn’t— everything is—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” Leia said, just a hint of amusement in her tone. “Though it’s nice to know I can still pull off intimidating even though I’m old and gray.” She sobered, expression turning distant. “I’m not always very good at this,” she began. The words were heavy with regret. She forged on anyway. “But you’re hurting.”

Leia let the statement hang, waiting for Rey. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, just— what was she supposed to say? _Your biological father thinks he was an instrument of the Force, and it destroyed him, just like it’s destroying your son?_

As a rule, Leia didn’t speak about her past, but that didn’t stop the rest of the galaxy; whispers, rumors, stories that turned to legend— all of it filtered across the stars, as far as Jakku and even farther. Leia Organa, princess of Alderaan. It was a moniker as familiar to Rey as Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, but it didn’t match up with the knowledge Anakin had poured into her head. The information had roared through her like a flash flood, the landscape of what she knew altered forever, made alien and strange. As far as she could tell, Leia had never acknowledged anyone but the Organas—and Luke—as family. Maybe Anakin had lied. Maybe she’d never been in Kylo’s heart at all, just trapped in some strange fever dream. But...

_Forgive me, grandfather._

She’d seen that in Kylo’s memories, long before she stumbled across a ghost in the desert. The shadow of Vader had been over him since the beginning. She’d wrenched it from his mind herself, turned him from a creature in a mask to a desperate young man in a single stroke. It was the second true thing between them, recompense for the dream he’d stolen. Balance, if she looked sideways and choked down the ugliness of it. 

Whatever else Anakin may have twisted in his narrative, that much was true. He was Kylo’s grandfather, and Leia’s father. Palpatine’s dog. 

She couldn’t imagine Darth Vader raising a child. Couldn’t imagine Leia ever accepting such a father, no matter when that knowledge was revealed to her, no matter how. She couldn’t talk to Leia about this. She was sick of hurting people, sick down to her bones; she’d find out what she needed to know some other way. Of course, that assumed there _was_ another way. 

Rey bit her lip, worrying it until Leia let out a long sigh, stepping forward to cup her hand against Rey’s cheek. The skin was as papery as she remembered it, but there was a strength behind it now, a steely comfort that she let herself cling to, just for a moment.

“Whatever happened,” Leia said, “just remember that you’re not alone.” There was no way Leia could know how that phrase cut, but oh, oh it hurt. “You don’t have to share your pain, but don’t think you have to carry it on your own, either.”

Rey swallowed, nodding even as a lump rose in her throat, tears and regret and the overwhelming urge to spill the whole story, turn over the hard choices to a woman who’d spent a lifetime making them. “I know,” she said instead. “I won’t forget.”

A sharp pang broke through the last shred of numbness, a short, keening howl from the bond. Rey shoved at the connection, furious and ashamed, until the howl subsided. 

Leia’s hand was steady on her cheek, but her expression was lined with grief. Decades of anguish turned sharp and fresh as she stood before Rey, the echo of her son’s pain an old wound that wouldn’t heal, welling up again and again with blood. Still, Leia carried herself with an iron surety even grief couldn’t diminish. “Good. I’ll send Poe in to debrief you.” One last touch to Rey’s shoulder, a warm, fleeting reassurance, and then she was gone, heading back toward the hangar bay.

Rey spent the next few minutes alone, trying to control her breathing; not meditation, but something close to it. Breathe in, breathe out. It was supposed to center her, but all she could hear was the howl, still shivering through her even in the silence. 

_What else was I supposed to do?_ The question went out across the bond before she could think better of it, the words scraped raw and filled with hopeless frustration.

Kylo didn’t answer. 

She was scrubbing at her eyes, trying to will away the threat of tears, when Poe strode into the room.

“Rey! I haven’t seen you in—” He broke off mid-sentence, grin sliding off his face. “Hey now, what’s got you so upset?”

“Nothing,” she said hurriedly, dropping her hands. 

“Tears aren’t nothing.” The words were gentle, but she bristled all the same. 

“I’m not crying,” she insisted, brittle. Her cheeks were dry.

“Still,” Poe said, closing the door and then turning to her with his arms open wide. “You look like you could use a hug.”

She waited for the howl to return, but there was nothing from Kylo’s end of the bond. She was alone in her head, left to grapple with the ghosts and the questions on her own. Poe was right: she could use a hug. 

He was shorter than Kylo, slim and lean where Kylo was broad, engine grease and the salt tang of sweat instead of deep spiced green, but none of that mattered. Rey fell into the hug with a desperate sort of gratefulness, letting someone who wasn’t buckling under the weight of the Force carry the load for a moment. 

Poe held her safe until she felt like she could stand on her own again. When she pulled away, it was a door shuttering, her mind made up. She needed answers, so she’d find them. As if he could sense the decision, he stepped back, mouth drawn in a worried frown. 

“I get that I’m not Finn, but you know you can talk to me, right?” 

She couldn’t, not really, but it was a kind offer. “Thanks, Poe. It’s just a long story. Long and stupid, and I don’t want to bother you with it, I just need some information.” She could hear the words starting to get a little frantic, but she couldn’t stop them. “It’s sensitive, I think, and I don’t know where to start—”

“Woah,” he said, “okay. I’m sure someone here can help. What are you looking for?” She could see why Finn liked him so much; he was kind, and remarkably good at rolling with the punches.

She took a deep breath, willing herself to ignore the panic, shove down all the guilt. “Anakin Skywalker.”

His eyes widened, her answer clearly not what he’d been expecting. “That’s not a name you hear very often these days. Have you talked to the General about this?” 

She shook her head. “It didn’t seem right.”

He sighed. “Leia’s a tough old bird. I’m sure she could handle it.”

“But she shouldn’t have to.” 

“No,” he said, face drawn in a frown. There was a palpable aura of grief around him, strong enough to sense in the Force even though Poe was all but blind to it. A flash of purple? It was gone before she could make sense of it. He turned away, grabbing two chairs from a stack in the corner and dusting them off with brisk efficiency. When he turned back, the sorrow was gone, leashed and tucked away. “I have an idea, but I’m gonna have to think about how to pull it off. In the meantime, let’s get that debrief out of the way.” 

He gestured to one of the chairs with a flourish. “Your seat, Madame Jedi.”

It was strange to laugh after the desert, after all the pain, but laugh she did. Poe smiled, only a little bit forced, and that was that. The debrief didn’t take long, no more than an hour. The strange nebula she’d seen took up a big chunk of their discussion, something troubling enough to bring to command, if not Leia herself. When they finished, Poe told her to get some food and some rest.

“Meet me in the mess in three hours. I should have your answers,” he said. “Maybe. I think.” He tossed her a joking salute and took off before she could ask about his plan or even where the mess was.

She found it eventually, alerted by the familiar yeasty scent of polystarch bread. Veg-meat and vaguely sulfurous tap water rounded out the selection on offer. The radar tech she ended up sitting with explained that she’d just missed out on some dried fruit. The old base was usually manned by a skeleton staff, with travellers rotating in and out as they passed through. As the ranks swelled for Leia’s visit, they’d run through their stores of fresh food and fallen back on rations. 

“You ever had veg-meat before?” the tech, Norrejja, asked as she saw Rey wrinkle her nose at the familiar green substance—dry and crunchy even after it was rehydrated—before giving in with a sigh. 

“Once or twice,” she replied, grinning despite herself. “You get used it.”

“You really don’t,” Norrejja laughed, tearing off a bite of her fruit.

Poe’s three hour estimate proved optimistic, but he found her eventually, still sitting with Norrejja, swapping stories. He interrupted a particularly wild tale, something about Chiss space, an illegal hyperdrive modification, a diplomatic missive gone astray, and an… oovei-feathered scarf? He strode through the mess hall doors with two droids at his heels, BB-8 chirping furiously, a chorus of scolding beeps. It looked like Poe was trying to ignore the tirade, but he wasn’t having much success. To be fair, it was to hard pull off studied indifference with an agitated BB unit whirling around your feet. 

“I know, buddy—” beeping, “—yeah, I heard you, I know you like having a friend around—” more beeping, “—but Rey needs some help—”

The argument continued as they moved through the maze of tables, R2-D2 following sedately behind. That was as ominous as anything else. The droid had spent most of the flight to Ahch-To conversing quietly with Chewie and catching up on everything that had happened while he slept, but he’d had no trouble taking Luke to task. More than once, she’d woken up to the sounds of an argument, Basic nearly drowned out by loud, sharp binary. 

BB-8 subsided with a final whistle, head drooping as they stopped in front of Rey. He rolled under the table, dejected, and she had to stifle a laugh. He looked like a loth-cat caught in a rainstorm, miserable but resigned to it.

“Hey Norrejja,” Poe said, sliding into the bench beside Rey. “Any chance I can borrow our esteemed Jedi for a minute?”

“Sure,” she said, tossing a napkin at him. “Maybe you can talk some sense into her. She thinks veg-meat is palatable.” She shook her head in mock disgust. “Always knew the Jedi were crazy.” 

Poe blinked at her as Norrejja grabbed her tray and headed out. “I don’t even know where to start with that.” He shook himself and refocused, gesturing toward R2-D2. “I think Artoo here can give you the answers you need. The information I’ve got is a little fuzzy, but he used to travel with Luke, and Threepio confirmed he knew about Ben Kenobi before Leia sent him to Tatooine.”

Her heart thudded painfully, _Ben_ echoing through her like a memory, like an ache, but the surname wasn’t familiar. “Ben Kenobi?”

“An old Jedi Master,” he explained. “It’s complicated, but like I said, Artoo should have the whole story. As far as anyone can tell, his data banks have never been wiped.”

It was worth a shot. “Thanks Poe,” she said. “Are you going to get in trouble when he turns up missing?”

He shot her a wry grin. “I asked Leia if I could borrow him for awhile, and she said she was better off without the details. I’m still in the doghouse for the mutiny, but the General’s got a soft spot for me.” The grin dulled a little. “Thank you for trying to spare her. People don’t do that often enough.” Again, that flash of purple, there and gone in an instant.

“Good thing she’s got you watching her back, then.”

“I try.” He stood, clapping a hand on her shoulder. “Good luck with Artoo,” he said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Thank you, Poe. Really. And say hi to Finn for me next time he checks in, yeah?”

“You know it. Come on, BB-8, we gotta roll.”

The little orange droid slunk out from under the table, whistling a sad goodbye to Artoo.

“Don’t worry,” Rey promised him, “I’ll have him back in no time.”

_I hope._

 

—

 

Three weeks to journey away from Castell, tracing a slow route to the Ash Worlds, the crowded stretch of planets a safe place to hole up and figure things out. Three weeks listening to a frustrated little droid, years and years of laughter and pain pouring out in emphatic binary, the gradual unburdening of an old, heavy knowledge.

Rey spent the time parsing fact from myth, sifting through each one of Artoo’s stories for the truth behind the mask of legend. Time and distance had distorted so much of what made it to Jakku, and she needed real answers. She needed to understand the heart of the family that kept wrecking the galaxy, only to reforge it and wreak havoc once more. 

What she found broke her own heart: the long, slow harrowing of a miracle child—fatherless in the desert, born to be an instrument of the Force—and all the consequences that came after. Anakin Skywalker was a slave his whole life through; transmitter chip or Jedi robes or Sith black, it made no difference— only the trappings changed. Luke, fatherless in the desert, the Jedi who came to free the slaves and the hero who fell prey to the blinding light of his own legend. Luke, who rose and set like the suns in splendor. Leia, last daughter of Alderaan, diplomat and warrior and shining beacon of justice unafraid, who pieced the stars back together with nothing but the iron strength of her will. Leia Huttslayer, breaker of her own chains. 

Others emerged, names and faces lost to history:

Shmi Skywalker, the impossible miracle of life in the desert. Mother of the Chosen One, betrayed and abandoned by those who believed her son would deliver them. No gift without price.

Padmé Naberrie, called Amidala: Queen of Naboo, fiercely capable politician, champion of the vulnerable. Padmé Naberrie, called Amidala: child-queen who gave her heart to slave boy and never got it back. Padmé Naberrie, called Amidala, whose love shattered the stars. 

Obi-Wan Kenobi, swordsman and daredevil and hopeless idealist, who believed in a balance that did not believe in him. A broken old man, desolate and wind-worn, hidden away in the desert until: _help me, you’re my only hope—_

Iego and her thousand moons spread out before the _Falcon_ , vast and glittering. Rey listened to Artoo’s chirps and whirrs, a softer chorus now, one hand resting on his domed head as she guided the old freighter through the ruins. 

The sounds came slowly, tinged with grief. He was talking about Ben now, a solemn face and wide eyes and a mop of dark hair, trailing after his mother and tugging shyly on his father’s sleeves, gaze always skyward. A moody teenager, brows drawn down like a dark slash across his forehead, his voice cracking as he fought with Luke, hoarse from shouting, raw from nights swallowing screams. Older, silhouetted by the orange lick of flame as the temple burned, staring down at a heap of rubble with a desperate look in his eyes, something like guilt, something like resignation.

Somehow, it was both the clearest of the images and the most difficult to picture. She tried to imagine the boy, but all she could see was Kylo, lightsaber flaring red, looking to the shadows instead of the stars. 

Artoo finally fell silent as they approached an empty docking station, regarding her with an air of weary patience. She waited until the _Falcon_ was securely docked before she let herself put her head in her hands, overwhelmed. 

She ran through the wealth of information Artoo had given her, wrestling with the scope of it, the joy and the horror. The astromech’s story meshed neatly with the knowledge Anakin had poured into her head in the desert of his grandson’s heart, slotting into place like puzzle pieces clicking together. The weight of that knowledge pressed down on her chest, a heaviness that made it hard to breathe. What was she supposed to do with it? He told her for a reason, surely, and the Force had— chosen her, somehow. It burned through her veins the same way it once burned through Anakin’s, two desert nobodies charged with fixing something bigger than they could ever comprehend. But— how? She was one person. One person was enough to tip the scales, that much was clear, but balance? That was impossible. 

Rey had been so sure she’d made the right choice. Sever the bond to focus on the war. Ending the war would restore the balance. That outcome had always seemed obvious, inevitable. Now it just felt hopelessly naive. Ahch-To’s endless harmony, Luke railing against Jedi hubris, Anakin’s talk of systems and pressure; all of it was so much more complicated than she’d first thought. Maybe the First Order was just another battle in a war too big to grasp without all the pieces— the conflict itself, the seed at the heart, that was the thing she needed to resolve. 

She knew too much, and not nearly enough. Kylo would hate her for it, she knew that in her bones, but she couldn’t make a choice like this on her own. She had to go back. If Anakin and the Force wanted something from her, they could at least give her some concrete details instead of letting her fumble around, blind and confused. 

“You’ll keep an eye on things for me?” 

Artoo whirred an affirmative. 

Deep breath in, deep breath out; the desert was waiting.

 

—

 

It was the same: pain, falling, and then the endless stretch of sand. Emptier now, no ghost in sight, but it was the same unforgiving desert she’d found herself in before, parched and brutal. The wind whistled, low and lonely, oddly cold. She spun in a slow circle, searching the horizon for any sign of Anakin.

Nothing. Just dunes and cold wind and endless searing suns. 

“Anakin,” she called out, trying to pitch her voice over the wind. “Anakin? Are you there?”

The wind blew harder, the whistle turning to a moan, deep and angry. The air darkened, as if clouds had suddenly drifted in, but when she looked up, the sky was clear. The hair on her arms and the back of her neck stood up. Something was wrong. 

_Rey._

The voice was hardly a whisper, just the barest hint of sound stealing through the wind, creeping into her head. 

“Anakin? Is that you? Stop playing games and show yourself.”

_I don’t have much time. I know you’re here for answers, but I can’t spare you any energy. He’s coming apart at the seams._

“Why?” she demanded. “What’s happened, is he hurt?”

_He has a hard time believing in light he can’t see,_ came the reply, tense and frustrated. Ashamed, too, but she couldn’t focus on that now.

“Help him, then!” Her voice was sharp where his was faint, a worry she couldn’t suppress coloring every word. 

_I am, Rey. But help only goes so far, you know that._

What was it about Skywalkers that always made her want to cry? They were desert born: they should know better. “Then you have to make it go further. You’re the Chosen One,” she flung at him, furious and suddenly terrified for Kylo, for herself, for all of them. The bond felt fuzzy, distant, shrouded in a dark mist that soured her breath with the metallic taste of ozone, the sick copper tang of blood and bile. “Figure something out!” she said, half shouting, an order giving way to a plea. 

For a brief instant, an anger not her own lit the air around her, flaring and furious, bright enough to drive out the gathering shadows. The ghost of a ghost, nothing more than a whisper in her mind, and Anakin Skywalker’s heart still burned. 

_It’s not as easy as you think. In his nightmares, the dead walk._ She flinched, but Anakin kept going, merciless. _Snoke dressed himself up in the guise of my worst mistakes, spoke in my voice, offered a hand when my grandson thought himself alone in the world. Now, he’s been too scared, too angry, in too much pain for too long to do anything but walk the path before him, no matter the cost._ The fire in his voice turned bitter, like the acrid smoke of a funeral pyre. _Trust me when I say I know what that can drive you to. You’ll walk yourself right into hell with a smile, too desperate to do anything but believe, even when you’re hurting the very people you want to protect. The people you want to love._

A hand outstretched, the Force curling into a stranglehold around a woman’s slender neck, ash falling soft as snow, the hilt of a saber cracking in two—

The darkness swirled back in, the light dimming even as Anakin’s anger surged anew, a wave of helpless fury roiling through her, familiar enough to make her bite back a sob. 

_You’re that desperate for someone to save him, little mouse?_

The _yes_ in her heart was unspoken, clear as dawn. But they’d had this conversation before, as painful then as it was now, and this wasn’t what she needed to know—

His anger fell away, replaced by an urgency to match her own.

_Everything is linked. Luke taught you that much at least. There’s no time, damn it— you’re so close to the answers, Rey. You just have to keep digging. You just have to look._

“Look at what?” she asked, the sob still stuck in her throat.

He didn’t answer. _There’s a storm coming in,_ he said instead, voice growing faint, and fainter still. _Promise me you’ll look, Rey. Promise me you’ll see._

“See what?” she repeated, the sob coming out like a scream. “What am I supposed to see? How the hell do you expect me to solve anything when you keep talking in riddles?” The question tore through her, frustration as raw and searing as Anakin’s rage. She flung another curse at him, words whipped away by the wind. It was howling now, and the air was so dark. The sky was cloudless, but she couldn’t see the suns; they were gone. She needed answers, now, and then she needed to get out. If he would just—

_I’m sorry_ , came the response, fading away. 

“Anakin?” His name vanished on the wind, once, twice, three times. He was gone. She’d the leave the desert empty-handed if she left at all. Sand swirled where she’d last seen the horizon, distant and ominous. This wasn’t Jakku, but that didn’t stop the word from ringing through her bones anyway, the old terror that dogged her steps every time the desert started to howl. _X’us’R’iia._

The storm roared through the darkness, a raging scream that drew closer and closer—no shelter, nowhere to hide—until she was sure it would swallow her whole. 

Then, it did. 

For a heartbeat, the world became sound. The lash of wind, the rush of sand drawn into the maw of the storm, an endless fury of noise that rattled through her skull until she lost all sense, biting her cheek until it bled, choking on dust as she tried to shield her face with the flimsy, too-thin barrier of her shirt. 

Bent double, she hunkered down against the wind, willing herself to wait it out. Just when she thought it would tear her apart, the howl died away. It left behind an odd, heavy silence, broken only by the ringing in her ears. Blinking grit from her eyes, she coughed and sputtered until her throat was raw, struggling free of her makeshift mask as she tried to draw a clear breath. No longer a storm, the wind still blew, deceptively soft. Sand swirled restlessly around her feet, tracing uneasy patterns she could barely make out until it coalesced into a dark shape, tall and broad and—

Oh, _oh_ , had she thought the storm was gone? It wasn’t gone at all, merely changed. Ben Solo stood before her, tall, lankier than she’d ever known him. Young, maybe sixteen? Still growing into his face and his frame, shoulders bowing under the weight of family legacy. The strange ringing in her ears wasn’t ringing at all, but a terrible, raw noise that lanced through her like a knife: Ben Solo, screaming. Ben Solo, furious and crying as the _Falcon_ blasted away and left him behind. Ben Solo, wrapping himself in chains, heavy manacles that dripped darkness and pain even as he kept reaching out for something she couldn’t see. 

Memory or nightmare or storm-fevered hallucination, she couldn’t bear it. She tried to turn away, but found she couldn’t. What had Anakin said, before the roar of the sandstorm swallowed her? _Look. Promise me you’ll see._ She sucked in a ragged breath, letting the hurt settle over her, and watched as pain and fear burned away pieces of _Ben_ , leaving behind a patchwork of scars and badly-stitched wounds, a figure in ragged black, face hidden. The creature in the mask: Kylo Ren. 

That was the heart of it, the ugly truth she’d been too torn up to realize. Kylo Ren was never just a facade she could strip away, something evil laid over the ruined foundations of Ben Solo, built stone by stone at Snoke’s whim. No. Kylo _was_ Ben, scars and wounds and aching darkness, forged by choice and circumstance both. Whatever names he carried, whatever guise he wore, he was only ever himself. 

Eyes burning, she watched until the specter faded, until the wind died away and took the screaming with it. The sky stayed dark; she had to leave now, before the the storm returned. The desert was never quiet for long. 

Kylo was the one who yanked her out, before, pulling her back to his ship before she had time to blink. She was alone this time— no Kylo, no Anakin. Just Artoo and the _Falcon_ and Iego’s broken horizon, littered with debris and memory both. 

The world shifted beneath her, the sensation of falling making her stomach swoop. It was as simple as that, then. She closed her eyes, focusing on the feeling of the bond, on old metal and engine grease, the hum and click of servomotors, the glittering spread of stars and moons. It was slow, but it hurt less than the falling. 

When she opened her eyes, she was back on the _Falcon_ , Artoo beeping softly at her, a stream of concern, quiet at first and then louder as she started to sway: _did you see him again, what did he say, are you alright, sit down before you fall down, you Jedi are all kriffing impossible—_

“Yeah,” she told him, dropping into the pilot’s seat even though she was in no shape to fly. Her voice came out as a croak, blistered with sand. “Message received.”

 

—

 

She sat for awhile, head between her knees, and waited for the world to stop spinning. Artoo hissed and whistled his way through a scathing tirade about young Jedi who overextended themselves and older Jedi who should know better and thrice-damned Jedi in general, frustration and concern coloring every sound. He kept it going as he disappeared down the corridor to fetch her canteen, and was still beeping when he came back, strap looped around a multitool extension arm, battered metal bumping along on the floor behind him. Rey took it from him with shaky hands. She had the distinct impression he’d have chucked at her if he were able.

Eventually, she eased herself out of the cockpit and made her way toward the main hold, stiff muscles protesting every movement. There was no chance of sleep tonight. She shuffled toward the dejarik table, clear of books and mechanical projects for once, and tried not to think. It was too easy to picture Kylo sitting across from her, navigating through the minefield of his past to try and help her. It was too easy to see him screaming in the desert. 

Artoo trundled back forth across the worn floor, annoyance turning slowly to distress. Finally the droid stopped pacing and made his way over to her, solemn now, waiting for answers.

She told him.

The words stuck in her throat at first, sharp-edged and brittle as broken glass, but once the story started spilling out of her, it gained momentum until it was a torrent, vicious and devastating as a breached dam. It broke something in her, the tears she spent so long trying to hold back suddenly coursing down her cheeks.

She cried for all of them, Anakin and Padmé, Luke and Leia, Han and Ben, every one of them caught in the uncaring web of the Force and making their choices as best they could. Her eyes burned and her throat ached. Salt dried in itchy, tacky streaks across her face, making her skin feel tight. She was probably dehydrated. She’d been better about this on Jakku, so painfully aware that water was precious— tears were a waste in the desert. 

Jakku was far away. Kylo was too. She let the tears come, let herself imagine for a moment that she could scrub the dust of the past off her skin and come out clean and whole on the other side. 

Artoo squeezed past the table to bump against her knee, and eventually, the tears stopped. She could feel sleep tugging at her, but she refused to let it pull her under. She pinched herself, once, twice, sharp enough to keep herself awake and alert for a while longer. It was the journey away from Crait all over again: if she slept, she’d dream, and if she dreamed— 

She was afraid. She could admit that to herself now. Afraid she’d see Kylo, afraid she wouldn’t, afraid they’d dream the same tangle of dreams that had haunted her since her last glimpse of the _Absolution._ The shared dreamscape was painful enough with only the knowledge of her own nightmares; now she understood Kylo’s, too. There was something unbearable about that, twisted and unfair, a vulnerability that made her want to look away.

_Promise me you’ll look._

No. She went to the desert for answers and found a private hell instead. If a solution was buried somewhere in Kylo’s pain, it would have to wait. She was in no shape to search for it now. 

Mind made up, she stood. Artoo let out a questioning whirr, and she gave him a gentle pat. 

“I’m fine,” she said, voice still a croak. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I’m fine, really.” Artoo managed to pack a wealth of skepticism into the silence that followed, somehow more judgemental than when he was beeping at her. “Alright, I’m not fine. But I will be. Let me up, I can’t meditate like this.”

He backed away and let her out from behind the table, grumbling a little when she immediately sat down on the floor.

“Hush,” she told him. “If I had a better idea, I’d do that instead.” Every muscle felt like jelly, wrung out and useless, but her awareness faded away as soon as she folded herself into the pose Luke taught her, the same as the mosaic on the temple floor. Legs crossed, hands open, the Force flowing through her. Light, dark, all of it. She throttled back her sense of the vast stream until it was just a whisper, gray and faint. It was like mist settling over her mind, a gentle fog that dulled all the sharp edges just enough that she could let her thoughts slip away and simply _be._

She had no idea how long she held the pose, or even when she closed her eyes. When she opened them, Artoo was whistling like a kettle left unattended, worried about her yet again. No wonder he was sour on Jedi, even though she wasn’t one, not really. All they seemed to do was cause him trouble. 

“We’ll start the journey back in a day or two, and then you can go back to minding BB-8.” She frowned as she stood back up, turning to glance at Artoo. “Though I’m not sure why you seem relieved about that. I can’t possibly be more trouble.”

The astromech was unrepentant. She still didn’t feel like laughing, but Artoo’s pointed retort pulled a weak grin from her. 

It was better than nothing.

 

—

 

The _Falcon_ was empty and silent.

Artoo was back with Leia, probably haranguing C-3PO and teaching BB-8 horrible words in his particular variant of droidspeak. The porgs were gone, too— she finally had to give in and relocate them, sick of cleaning up feathers and breaking up spats as the juveniles fought over the right to flap around in the cargo holds. They weren’t very noisy—at least not when the ship wasn’t taking fire—and they’d spent most of their time near Chewie’s old bunk, out of range of her hearing, but the silence they left behind was disproportionately loud. Even the sublights and the hyperdrive seemed quieter, the last of Plutt’s modifications finally gone. 

Silence should have made it easier to meditate, to try and untangle the threads of what the Force needed to be whole. Her days were filled with cool gray mist, cut through with memories of raging deserts. At night, when her dreams were her own, she heard the crash of waves on Ahch-To’s ageless shore, saw untethered moons spinning out into darkness. She woke with the tense blank ache of the bond knotted in her chest, always there no matter how firmly she tried to ignore it. 

Instead, the quiet left her at loose ends: no missions, no company. No Kylo. All three of those facts were her own doing, but that didn’t matter to the loneliness. 

So when a question rang through the bond, shocking in the still silence of the ship, she couldn’t find it in herself to ignore it.

_Rey?_

Just one word, tentative, hollow.

_I’m here._

_You’re not_ , came the reply. Then, all caustic humor: _you’re on the wrong ship._

The Force swirled through her, urgent and insistent. She didn’t try to make sense of it this time, didn’t try to understand what it wanted from her. She didn't need to. For once, it was the same thing she wanted. 

She closed her eyes and let the bond sweep her toward Kylo.

 

—

 

He was waiting for her, staring out at a stretch of unfamiliar stars. They were in the corridor outside his quarters on the _Absolution_ , empty and dimly lit. He turned from the view as she approached, his face carefully blank.

It was a familiar mask, one she hadn’t seen in months. Denon? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t fool her then, and it didn’t now. Kylo was— aching, and angry, and shredded with sorrow. His sadness washed over her like the waves on Ahch-To, a crashing, relentless fury. 

She wanted to hold him. She wanted to sort through that aching sadness and _fix it_. Instead, she bit her tongue on the questions welling up like blood—what is this, why now, are you okay—and waited for him to speak. 

When he did, his voice was as shredded as his Force signature. The sound of it hit her like a blow. Worry and a strange, crushing surety rose in her heart. Stars, she’d missed him so badly. How had she ever expected herself to sever the bond? The war, the galaxy, the Force— they were all too big, too impossible, problems she didn’t have answers for. Half a monster or a victim of circumstance, it didn’t matter; the man in front of her was real, and he bled and hurt and cared, and he mattered to her. The connection thrumming between them mattered. She couldn’t justify it beyond that. She’d have to, someday soon. Standing in chill darkness of the _Absolution_ , looking at Kylo and his pain, she pushed the thought aside. Someday wasn’t now.

“—Rey?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “say it again for me?”

His gaze turned brittle. “I said you were right. We can’t keep doing this.”

_What?_ she thought, almost dazed, _no._ She echoed the thought aloud, confusion making it come out sharp. “I thought—”

“It was unforgivably foolish of me,” he continued, voice icy, cutting through hers as if she’d remained silent. “You’ve had access to classified data, the status of the fleet, even my quarters. Industrial contacts, the movements of my personal flagship, the list goes on. Scrapping and replacing everything I’ve allowed you to compromise will take months.”

She flushed, shocked anger lighting through her, until something else surfaced. Anaxes was an oily film of memory: an encrypted comm, the sight of a smile, the weight of a choice. 

“Kylo—”

He kept going. “You’d have to be a fool not to report what you saw. This— connection was a perfect cover, a facade over reconnaissance work. When you had the information you needed, you moved to sever it.” His voice was rote, emotionless now. “Finish what you started. End it, Rey.”

Shame, anger, her own, his; she was drowning in it. She wanted to yell, to grab him and shake until he started making sense again. She almost did, but it was too simple. His words were one thing, but his face, oh, his face—

“No.”

“No?”

“You heard me,” she said. The storm of frustration still swirled in her chest, but somehow her voice came out steady. “I said no.”

“Why not?” 

Was that a tremor in his voice?

“Because it’s not true. And you know it.” Anaxes floated across her memory again, shame heaped on shame, but she forged through it. “None of this was ever reconnaissance. None of it was planned.” 

“Rey—”

It was her turn to interrupt, soft but ruthless. “A spy didn’t ignore you for months because they didn’t know what else to do. A spy didn’t wrestle with Jedi ethics and their own better judgement and kriffing plain common sense and end up falling asleep on your shoulder anyway. A spy didn’t dream of you, didn’t dream _with_ you.” She swallowed, trying to keep her voice calm. _Soft_ , she told herself, _soft_. “That was me, Kylo. The whole time, it was just me.”

His face was still shuttered but the mask was shatterglass now, cracks appearing with every word. 

“You _know_ I’m not a spy. It’s a lie you’re telling yourself, and you don’t even believe it. I can feel how much it hurts, and I know you can feel it too, so whatever this is, whatever you’re trying to accomplish, just stop. Please, just stop.”

She’d stepped forward almost without noticing. He towered over her, close, so close. He couldn’t hide the flinch. 

“We’ve talked wounds before,” he said, and his voice was a rasp, shaky and layered with grief.

She remembered. “On Lothal.”

“There’s no healing this. We’re at war, Rey, and we’re both bleeding out.” He brought his hand up to her cheek, infinitely gentle, infinitely sad. “So please, just end it.”

She kissed him instead. 

It was— everything. The roar of an engine as the sky turned to stars. Power singing through her body, alive and vibrant with the Force. The scream of the wind in the desert, the crash of the sea against the shore. Desperate and full of so much promise, so much heartbreak that she wanted to cry. 

She pulled back. They were both shaking now. Kylo’s eyes were dark and wild. He looked shocked, somehow grateful and stricken both, a man drowning in the desert. 

He searched her face, and whatever he found there made him draw in a ragged breath. “Rey,” he said, helpless. 

_Always my name_ , she had time to think, and then he was gathering her into his arms and everything that wasn’t Kylo ceased to matter.

 

—

 

They stumbled through the doorway into his quarters, hurried, almost frantic. His hands were everywhere, stripping away her vest and armwraps, creeping beneath the rough linen of her shirt, huge and warm against her skin. Stomach, ribs, breasts— he paused when she gasped, sparks flaring in the wake of his touch.

“Keep going,” she told him, her own hands roaming greedily across stark lines of muscle, the architecture of arm and shoulder, then on to the pulse beating at his throat. It hammered there, vital and alive. A desperate sort of impulse grabbed her: she wanted to kiss that spot, to know, with the absolute certainty that only touch could grant, that he was real. Not some fever dream her longing had conjured up, not some cruel trick of the Force, but the man she’d come to know. Ben, Kylo, monster, friend— she wanted him. Would she ever have him like this again? Stretching up, she pressed her lips to the hinge of his jaw and felt him shudder. He hauled in an unsteady breath when she trailed down to his pulse and let her tongue flicker out, tasting skin and dark spice. 

The moment she pulled away, the world turned a soft white. He drew her shirt over her head and flung it away, unimportant. Her chest wrap followed. She didn’t see where either landed because he was touching her again, taking her at her word, calluses rasping across the delicate skin of her nipples. The friction made her gasp again, higher, thready, and he chased it this time instead of stopping, bending to kiss her as he traced nonsense patterns across her breasts. She fell into the kiss, heat settling low in her belly as he pressed against her. 

_This is real_ , it said. The stroke of his tongue against hers and the fit of their bodies as they held each other were silent reassurances, _we’re here, this is real, this is real_. The fraught tension that had crackled through the bond since she arrived bled away, leaving only heat and need. 

A single step away, a brief moment to wriggle out of the rest of her clothes and frown at the layers Kylo still wore, and then she drew close again. She was a scavenger, even after all this time: her fingers were quick and deft and a little reckless, undoing all the hidden clasps of his tunic, pulling it off him without letting him back away even a fraction. She traced every inch of him she could reach, his chest, his back, a map drawn by touch. It was a slow, greedy exploration, undeterred by the way his hands cradled her face, carded carefully through her hair. 

She was a beggar at a feast. She wanted everything. The broad strength of his body. The planes of his face, inelegant and handsome all the same. His lips, so incongruously soft. She traced them, featherlight, then pulled him down into another kiss, lush and deep and dizzying. They were moving, guiding each other in clumsy steps toward the bed. She fell back onto it, Kylo braced above her. He looked dangerous and fragile and wholly focused, drinking in the sight of her beneath him like he was parched for it. 

His need matched her own. She couldn’t stop touching him. The gentle scrape of her nails pulled a groan from deep in his chest. She swallowed the sound as he bent to kiss her, a whine of her own escaping when he strayed from her mouth, scattering kisses across her collarbone, moving from freckle to freckle. Something in her chest clenched. 

He felt it. Of course he felt it: the bond was wide open, a current that had already swept them away. 

“Don’t think.” Kylo skated a hand across her hip, trying to make her shiver. He succeeded. “Just— stay with me.” His eyes were dark and painfully earnest. This close, she could see a shadowy hint of gold in the deep brown of them, a hidden warmth that lit his gaze as he studied her. She’d never noticed, before. 

“I know.” Her voice was wobbly, thick with emotions they were both trying so hard to ignore. There would be time for guilt later. She buried her fingers in his hair, trying to hide how they wanted to shake. 

Hunger and desperation and _tenderness_ rolled through the bond. Kylo’s heart was wide open. Her chest hurt, new and familiar and more than she could bear. She pulled him closer, wordless. 

“Do you— can I—” he couldn’t seem to find words either, but the images were clear enough, what he wanted to do. They rolled through her mind like storm clouds, a cascade of dreams where he put his mouth on her, right were she ached, and the universe unravelled until it was just the two of them, just their bodies, just this.

The heat simmering in her belly turned wild, overshadowing everything else, the desperation and the heartache and the tiny sliver of nervousness that kept whispering she was out of her depth. She felt her fingers clench in his hair, unconscious and automatic. “Yes,” she said, “please, I want—”

His mouth was back on her skin before she could finish voicing the thought. _I want you, I want this_ echoed all around them, made both of them shiver as he moved, layering hot, wet kisses down her chest and stomach. His hair slid through her fingers as she loosened her grip, let him rest his forehead against the same hip he’d stroked, drawing in one breath, two. She could hear the whisper through the bond as he told himself to slow down. He settled between her thighs, and she had a momentary, half-formed thought about logistics before he pressed his mouth to her core and all traces of thought fell away. 

Sensation flooded through her veins, searing and intense, too much, too much— he pulled away, came back, tried again. The shock of it fading, all she could think was how different it was, his mouth instead of her fingers. Warm, and different, and a little strange, and then— it changed. He found a rhythm somehow, lips soft and clever now, a knife-edged balance between careful and rushed. It made heat build and coil through her, slow and steady and relentless. She bit back a moan, her hips canting up and her fingers twisting helplessly in the sheets as he licked into her, fire tracing up her spine until she felt as fragile as spun glass. She fell apart in his hands, his fingers biting into her hips, holding her steady as she bucked and shook and shattered. 

“Enough,” she finally panted out, breathing hard, pushing at his head. He pulled away with another groan, but didn’t go far. He sucked a wet mark onto her inner thigh, laved at it with his tongue, the same maddening pattern that had turned her to glass, repeated over and over again as if he couldn’t get enough. 

_—stay like this forever if you let me_ slipped through the lingering haze in her mind, words half-wild with bliss, mingling with the warmth of his mouth and the ache that still throbbed between her legs. She let go of the sheets, hands finding his hair again, guiding him back to where they both wanted him. 

He went. 

Rey felt greedy, half-wild herself, so hungry for his mouth, for the small sounds he made when she tugged at his hair, for the heat and the pleasure and the deep satisfaction of being wanted like this. He was greedy in return, shameless with it, pulling her close each time she squirmed out of reach, lapping at the wet of her until she was senseless, languid waves of fire rolling over her, endless and exquisite. She was drowning, convinced each touch would be the one to shatter her. Instead, the pleasure built and built, hot, gold, shimmering, until it finally bloomed inside her like a star, a slow radiance that left her boneless and halfway to tears. 

Every muscle was wrung out and useless. She scrabbled at his shoulders until he came back to her, face wet, as she shaken as she was. An edge of desperation crept back into the bond, nerves and a growing fear that they were running out of time. She didn’t let herself think twice. The laces of his stupid pants were needlessly complicated, too much for her shaky hands to fumble through. _You do it_ she started, mind so close to his that he took over before the thought was finished. He stripped down to the skin then stood beside the bed, trembling. Waiting. 

Maybe he was nervous too. 

“Kylo.” His name came out as a husky plea, a sound she’d never heard herself make before. Hunger keened in a shivery feedback loop between them, a heartbeat that drove them both forward. 

She sat up, moving toward the edge of the bed as he came back into reach, eyes roaming over him. Acres of skin. Scars, freckles, more scars. A faint trail of hair that started low on his belly and tapered down into the vee of his hips. 

He was infuriatingly proportional. Flushed red, leaking at the tip. She wanted to touch him, badly, so she did, marvelling at the delicate soft skin, the heavy solid length of him. His mind sparked with white fire as she touched him, palm and fingers wrapping around him in a gentle grip. There was time enough for this. There had to be. Hesitantly, she stroked up, slow and careful. More fire, but it was muted. How had he touched himself? She rifled through her memories of that shared moment, ignoring the coil of want that twisted through her. There: a faint image of calluses rasping almost painfully over his cock, frantic and harsh as he chased his release. He wasn’t tender with himself. _Rougher, then_ , she decided, even as it made some distant part of her quietly sad. Someone should be tender with him. 

He shuddered, and she pushed the thought away. Firmer grip, bolder strokes. She twisted her wrist, and he startled like a live wire in her hand. A garbled sort of apology rose in his mind as he shoved his hips forward into her touch, reached out as if to cup her cheek before he thought better of it.

“Oh, _fuck_ — Rey—”

She kept going, mesmerized by the sheen of sweat breaking out on his chest, the way the tendons in his arms flexed as he clenched his hands into fists, the hot slide of him against her palm, slick now as she circled the head of his cock. It eased her strokes, let her speed up without fear that she’d hurt him. A thought drifted across her mind, vivid and electric; her mouth—

—his end of the bond crashed like the sea, white and roaring. It made her smile even as she pressed her thighs together, suddenly desperate for more friction. That half-wild bliss made sense now. It was a pleasure all its own to know she could unravel him like this, give him the same gift he’d given her. She kept stroking him, greedy again, impatient, until a single thought broke through the noise in his mind, _wait, wait—_

She stopped, confused. He was a hair’s breadth away from the edge. She could see it in his expression, in the way he strained to keep still. “You don’t want to?”

A pained grin split his face. His hands came up to cover hers, pulling her gently away. “I want it too much,” he said, curling their fingers together. A dull flush spread across his cheeks and out to his ears. “Any more and this will be over before it starts.” 

Oh. “If that’s—”

“No,” he said quickly, bright red now. “I want to be inside you.”

They’d been headed there all this time, but the blunt words were a surprise somehow. The weight of them rekindled the thread of nervousness his mouth had smothered. It flared bright now, because she’d never _done_ this, and he seemed so— sure.

“Unless you don’t—”

“No, no!” she cut him off, cheeks scarlet to match his. “I want that, I want— I want you.”

The relief on his face startled a laugh out of her. She tamped the nerves down and tugged at his hand, wanting him closer. 

A wobbly step forward, and then he sat down next to her. The silence was patient, a little chagrined. He stroked a familiar pattern across her knuckles, light touches that sent sparks curling lazily through her blood. She ached, sharper now, heedless of the nervous flutter in her stomach, insistent even with her thighs pressed together. Still—

“How does this work?” she blurted out. “I’ve never done this before, and you’re—” she paused, then made herself say it. “You’re so sure. It’s a little intimidating.”

“Little?” He said the word solemnly, but she could tell he was biting back a smile. A joke to set her at ease?

“Switch off,” she muttered. “You know what I mean. Don’t get—” _Oh kriff._

“—cocky?” He didn’t manage a straight face this time. A smile broke through, and then he was laughing, loud and deep. A real laugh, the first one she’d ever heard. It stole through her chest and curled behind her ribs, the sound of it enough to break her heart.

She didn’t have to say anything. Kylo sobered, pulled free of her grip, gently, carefully; she clung for a moment, then let him go. He moved back along the bed until he reached the pillows, then stretched out a hand once more as soon as he was settled. She took it immediately, scooting back to join him. Another twinge of nervousness pricked at her as she looked at him. Broad shoulders, the wide solidity of of his chest, long legs— laid out on the bed like this, waiting for her, his body was as foreign as it was familiar. 

He pulled her close, helped her straddle his hips. 

“Like this?”

“Yeah.” His voice was hoarse. He coughed, clearing his throat. “Yes. Just like that, whenever you’re ready.”

It felt like a prelude to something, some invitation she wanted to accept but didn’t know how to act on, but then he kept going. 

“You control it, Rey, because I’ve never done this either.” 

“What?”

He took her hand again, guided it to his chest. His heart beat wildly beneath her palm. 

“But you seemed…”

“I was a teenage boy.” He flushed again and looked away, the tips of his ears bright red, glowing against the dark mess of his hair. “We were ascetics, in theory, but that doesn’t mean anything to hormones.” He laughed, faint, only slight bitter. “No partners, but I had dirty holos and an active imagination.” He sobered again, lifting his gaze to her face. “Rey, anything you’re not comfortable with—”

“I am,” she broke in. “I just didn’t— I hate feeling like I’m a step behind.”

“You’re not,” he told her, skimming a hand up her arm to trace her cheek, the shell of her ear, delicate, painfully tender. “You’re not. All I’ve got is theory.”

Her turn to set him at ease. “We’ll be terrible at this together, then.”

A rueful smile kicked up the corner of his mouth, and she could no more stop herself from bending to kiss him than she could stop herself from breathing. Hands planted on either side of the pillows, she didn’t hold back. Neither did he. It was a hungry kiss, relieved, almost feverish. His hands traced her ribcage the found the span of her hips. His grip was rough, warm even with heat building inside of her once more. The ache between her thighs was a throbbing emptiness now. She rocked her hips back and forth, mindless, trying to ease it with friction alone, skin on skin for an endless stretch of minutes before she gathered herself enough to pull away. She shivered as she reached back, want drifting across her skin like the sear of a noon wind. 

“Wait—”

She didn’t. A fumbling moment, and then he was where she needed him. It hurt, a little. Less than rumor and gossip had given her reason to expect. More the stretch of an unused muscle than anything else, a burgeoning fullness that made her want to squirm. Beneath her, Kylo’s mind was hazy, a sliver of him chanting, _kriffing hell— fuck— slow, it’s okay— slow_ , the rest of a blur of sensation as he struggled against the urge to move. 

“It’s okay,” she echoed back to him as she shifted, trying to get used to the feel of him. He stayed still, the whirl of his thoughts the only sign of the effort it took. Inch by inch, she sank down until she sat flush against him once more. It was— uncomfortable. The fullness bordered on painful now, pushing away the heat in her veins until it was frustratingly distant. She wanted the kind of immediate bliss threatening to overtake Kylo, not this awkward, stilted stretch. She hitched her hips, the barest imitation of what had felt so good before, and was rewarded with a slow curl of pleasure. It was faint, but it grew stronger as she kept moving. He was quivering beneath her, trembling, intent on letting her lead. “Kylo, please,” she bit out, “move. I need you to move.”

He did. He surged into motion, hips thrusting up into her, and there it was, the heat she’d been trying to recapture. The discomfort faded as the pleasure started to build, coiling into a knot of warmth low in her stomach. She kept moving, the both of them falling into a pattern, a rhythm. She waited for the heat to bloom. Instead, it stayed there, low and warm but not _enough_. It was— wrong. She tried to will it away, canting her hips, gasping when he slid deeper. It was good, it was so good, but there was something missing. It wasn’t a physical feeling but a craving for something she couldn’t name, a want that had nothing to do with pleasure, nothing so simple as heat or hunger. 

Kylo could feel it, whatever it was. He slowed, muscles rippling smoothly as he sat up, gathering her into his arms, trying to find a better angle for her. Rey leaned into him instead, burying her face in his neck. She breathed in salt and spice and the heavy smell of sex, comfort overlaid with frustration. She bit back an angry noise, keyed up and confused, reaching for a feeling that was suddenly distant and out of reach. He stopped moving altogether, and that made it worse. She could feel the sharp bite of his hunger like a knife against her mind, a brutal edge he shoved away to focus on her. It scraped like a ghost over them both as he forced himself to be still. This was—

She went to pull away, upset and aching and with half a mind to just ignore it, but a thought drifting across the bond stopped her.

_Sweetheart,_ he started, the word so gentle, so worried, so full of love. _What’s wrong?_

She tucked herself back against his chest, voice muffled when she answered. “I don’t know.” It was a whisper, frustrated and thick with tears.

He was silent. One moment stretched out, then another. Before the silence could build beyond that, he shifted, one hand coming up to her cup the back of her head. Her hair was loose, damp with sweat, hanging in wild disarray around her face and down her back. Kylo began to card through it in slow, careful strokes, gathering it up, working through tangles until it lay in a smooth river along her spine. Patient, unhurried, comfort for comfort’s sake. A gift freely given. 

Skywalkers, always making her cry. 

It wasn’t a hard flood of tears this time; instead, it felt like relief, a way to purge the fear wound in knots around her heart. Kylo held her through it, stroking her hair all the while. When she finally stopped, pulling in a shuddery breath, his hand stopped as well, a still, warm weight against her back. 

“Rey?” 

Stars, the worry in his voice. 

“Just— like this. Keep holding me.”

His arms tightened around her. “Alright.”

He stayed still. She bit her lip, then spoke. She was past nervousness, past self-conscious worry. “Can we try again?”

“Of course. Anything, however’s best.” 

He didn’t ask what happened, didn’t push for the reason behind her tears; he was trusting her. The realization was soft as starlight. Kylo trusted her, but she didn’t trust herself. Self-denial was familiar, even easy. Letting herself have what she wanted? That was something else entirely. And the last time—

Desire, the creeping sense of shame stealing away her joy like a thief, and threaded through it all, an ache to be in his arms, to have him _there_. 

“I need to touch you,” she said. Then, more quietly, “it can’t be like last time.”

“No,” he agreed, following her train of thought with ease even as he kept a careful distance in the bond. She caught a brief flash of how worried he’d been, after. The glimpse sent a pang through her chest, right behind her ribs. It flowed away as he shifted them, moving carefully until she was lying back against the mattress, the position nearly a mirror of the one they’d started in. He was closer this time, his hands braced differently, the heavy weight of his body draped across hers. When she shivered this time, it wasn’t from the sting of memory.

Everything was different. The angle, the pace, her own range of movement, none of it was quite as good as it was astride his hips. It didn’t matter. The ragged pant of his breath against her neck, the ripple of muscle in his back as she held him, the sheer animal closeness—

It was enough. Slowly at first, then more quickly, like sparks catching and flaring through tinder, pleasure began to burn. She reveled in it, warmth no longer dim, no longer faltering. The hot tendrils bloomed through her, a tense sweetness that only made her clutch him closer. He faltered when she wrapped a leg around his waist. Urgency flared across the bond, taking the sweet and turning it sharp. She clenched around him, chasing after the edge so suddenly back in reach. 

“Sithing _hell,_ ” he ground out, winded, punch-drunk. “I won’t— I won’t last if you keep that up.”

She did it again anyway. “I don’t care. It’s, stars, it’s— so good, I just need—”

Kylo swore again, hips stuttering, before he threw his weight to one arm and reached down to where they were joined, fumbling for the spot that would shatter her. He groaned when he found it and she jerked in response, every nerve in her body lighting up like a live wire. 

The bond was glowing, a brilliant silver rope of song and starlight, spun through with ribbons of velvet darkness. When it flowed through to her, Kylo’s thought was an echo of that aching, desperate radiance. 

_Let me— please— let me take care of you, sweetheart— Rey—_

“Yes,” she gasped. Thought? Both, maybe, too caught up to know where she ended or the bond began. She pulled him close, closer, pressed her mouth to his salt-slick skin as the universe blew apart in a wave of endless, glittering heat. 

_Come on_ , she urged, blinking stars from her vision as she felt him shake. No semblance of control now, no finesse. He was so close. She could feel it, a sharp echo cutting through the haze of radiant heat in her blood. 

_Kylo—_

The sound of his name through the bond made him whine, hips jerking helplessly against hers.

“Kylo,” she said again, “Ben,” —a wild sound— “my heart, my heart, come on, come _home—_ ”

 

—

 

_After:_

 

“I can’t, Rey, I can’t—”

 

_and:_

 

It was quiet.

He came with a muffled cry. A sob, or her name; something raw and hoarse. He collapsed against her chest, gasping like he’d run a thousand miles to reach her. She held him as their heartbeats started to settle and their breathing slowed, heat ebbing out of the bond. It was gone now, leaving them in silence and a tender, silver-spun darkness. 

She could feel his worries starting to build, clamoring at his mind. Small things, needles of shame and fear that barely pricked at him now, but she knew what they would lead to. Wounds he still didn’t know how to heal were welling with blood. 

Still, he held his tongue, some part of him certain that if he spoke, everything would end. The same irrational certainty gripped Rey, but they didn’t need voices for this. She pushed hair away from his face, stroking over his cheeks until he lifted his head and met her gaze. 

_My heart_. Soft but clear, starlight on a cloudless night, dawn spreading across the line of the horizon. She thought it in a dozen different ways, in every language she spoke, sent it to him in every image of home she knew how to conjure. He whispered it back across the bond, ragged but true, and the tattered sound of it crept into a familiar place behind her ribs, the home he’d carved for himself since the beginning. 

_My heart_. 

She shuddered, love washing over, familiar as wind in the desert, the crash of waves on the shore, the sound of his voice on her name. It hurt, and soothed, and hurt, but the bittersweet ache shivering through her heart didn’t stop her from pulling him close once more. 

He kissed her like they had the rest of their lives to do this; soft, slow, cherishing. 

Stars, she’d miss him. She missed him already. Rey stifled a wild sound, something lonely and scared—almost pleading—that wanted to crawl out of her throat. He was here now. That would have to be enough. The future could wait a little longer. 

Kylo rolled them over on their sides, gathering her close, fingers tracing that maddening pattern over the ridge of her hip then dipping lower, a cautious tease. Heat unfurled in her belly, pushing away the dread. 

_Just us_ , one of them thought, _just this_ , and then there was no room for thought at all. 

 

_and:_

 

“What did you see?”

They were talking now, in hushed voices just loud enough to be heard over the constant hum of the aircon. He was still furnace-warm; she didn’t feel the cold at all.

There was no use in pretending she didn’t know what he meant. “Ghosts, mostly.”

He made a sound low in his throat, disbelieving, as though the answer were too simple. “That’s all?”

“What do you think I saw?” She was sprawled on his chest, fingers tracing a simple path across his skin. No nonsense patterns, just back and forth across his heart. The world rose up and down as Kylo sighed. She waited. 

“I don’t know,” he said eventually. “That’s what worries me.”

“I didn’t go looking for your secrets,” she told him, voice a little stronger now. He had to know. “I went to try and put an end to…”

“To what?”

“To all this.” She let him into her memories; the confusion, the crushing guilt, all the emotions that had twisted her up in knots when she realized she cared. The impossible, inescapable scope of the war. “Betrayal. Heartbreak, maybe. I think I knew that’s where we were headed, even from the beginning.” Her fingers stilled. “I don’t want to be at war with you.”

His fingers tangled with hers, a heavy weight over his heart. She didn’t need the bond to know how it felt. “Neither do I, sweetheart.”

A thousand arguments flashed through her mind, quick as starlines. Just as quickly, they burned out. He needed to make his own choice. For a brief instant, his grip tightened. Anger? Gratitude? She couldn’t tell. The bond shimmered between them, but she shook her head, dismissing it. She didn’t want to know. She focused her gaze on the broad stretch of his chest, marred with scars and yet still so strong. 

“Tell me something,” he said, voice thick. 

“What?”

“Anything.”

She mustered up a smile. “I’d tell you about Chandrila, but I’ve heard you’re somewhat of an expert on the subject.” 

His smile was a mirror of hers, wan but determined. “Expert might be a stretch. Well-versed, maybe.” Teasing and scholarly. And caring, she realized with a pang. He was trying to steer them back to safer subjects, to set them both at ease.

“There was a nebula,” she began, “out near the edge of the Unknown Regions.”

They talked like that until they were both hoarse, until the light of a foreign sun began to creep into the room, slow and relentless. She had to go. They both knew that. They clung to each other anyway, trying to fit a lifetime into a few stolen moments.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor. A comm alert chimed, humming cheerily on his desk. She slid her hand from his grasp and stood, only a little wobbly. Her clothes were strewn about the room. She gathered them, silent, and dressed in stiff, mechanical movements.

A brief, lingering kiss, and then he pulled away. She stepped back from the bed, made herself close her eyes, and thought of the _Falcon_. 

They did not say goodbye.

 

—

 

The interlude with Kylo left her melancholy, but determined. The _Falcon_ was still too quiet, but she’d put aside her problems long enough. She fell back into the routine she’d carved out for herself after Iego, meditating on what she knew for hours at a time, breaking only to stretch or eat. At night, she crawled into her bunk and did not dream.

Static buzzed through the bond, a cold hum that made her think of Ilum; Ilum conjured broken things, legacies, orbital patterns. The inevitability of gravity, and how its chains turned to feathers with enough perspective. 

Anakin seemed so sure that she had the answers. _Look._ The admonition circled through her mind, joined by memories of Luke on the island, _powerful light, powerful dark_ , voices running together and bleeding through each other until she couldn’t tell which was which. The world was gray mist, a collapsed binary that was obvious and obscure at the same time. She wasn’t getting anywhere with it.

Rey opened her eyes to a headache and a familiar lack of answers, muscles strung tight with tension. Scowling, she pushed herself up off the floor, tottering a bit as one hamstring stubbornly refused to relax. Every time she sat down to meditate, she ran into the same issue: she could see the shape of the problem now, but now how to fix it. It was almost like assembling her saberstaff, parts floating in slow circles around her, except this time she had no idea how anything was supposed to fit together. Awful as it was, she could see some thread of logic behind Anakin’s arguments about the nature of energy, the imbalance of light and dark and the way the same war kept burning through the galaxy, a solar flare as regular as clockwork. What she couldn’t make sense of was what that said about…everything else. 

The Jedi were the lens through which the galaxy understood the Force. The Jedi were good, and they used the Force, so the Force must also be good. The Force was light. Light was benevolent. And if the Sith were the Jedi cast in shadow, then clearly the dark was evil. Even isolated and starving on Jakku, scrolling through old holos and data-tapes on nights when hunger wouldn’t let her sleep, that was the way the Force was presented. A clear binary—light and dark—with good and evil as a self-evident mirror. 

“But it still doesn’t make _sense._ ” It was easy and obvious, the historically correct answer. Yet it didn’t match up with the evidence right in front of her, to Anakin’s memories and Ben’s scars, or even to the mosaic that still haunted her. 

She huffed out a frustrated breath as she moved slowly toward the galley. Tea probably wouldn’t help anything, but she needed something to do with her hands, and on Ahch-To, Luke was adamant that drinking caf was the fastest way to sabotage meditative thinking. Though who was he to judge? There was no way green sea alien milk could possibly clear the mind, at least not if his grimace was anything to go by. 

The tea was ready in minutes, hot and sweet and surprisingly welcome. She savored the warmth between her palms as she made a circuit around the _Falcon_ , partly to stretch her legs but mostly because she was sick of sitting. 

“So. Assume the Force is exactly what Anakin said it is: energy. Energy doesn’t have an agenda. It just flows. If light and dark are just two ends of a spectrum, two ways in which that energy is released, then… what does that mean?”

It meant the sides of the Force were abstractions that couldn’t be tied to anything as reductive as _good_ and _evil._ The war wasn’t just a clash of political ideologies. The conflict could have been about race or religion or any other subject likely to flare into war; the cause was secondary to the result. The war was a pressure valve, a ruptured torrent of dark energy that had been building for years. Hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, since the Jedi first abandoned true balance. The dominant Force users for millennia, endorsed by governments across the ages, the Jedi shaped how people viewed—and used—the Force. Now, the system was desperately venting pressure, the same way an overstressed engine would. Sometimes they stabilized. Sometimes they blew. 

A shiver of icy dread made its way slowly down her spine. That conclusion was bad enough on its own, but another, even more terrifying thought was gathering, looming over her like a storm cloud. 

Maybe Anakin had been so caught up in his frustration that he didn’t think to mention it—that seemed like a thing the hot-headed Jedi in Artoo’s memory banks would do—but the information he’d given her was only partially correct. The Force was energy, but it wasn’t _just_ energy. There was a primeval sort of sentience to it, enough of a mind to try and manipulate things back into the shape it wanted to see. Spinning a piece of itself into Anakin, constantly pushing she and Kylo into each other’s paths. Maybe even encouraging the rise of the Sith. It clearly didn’t subscribe to any kind of higher morality, not if slaughter appeased it. 

Younglings running, heavy boots advancing with relentless, dispassionate precision, chasing them deeper and deeper into the temple sanctuary—

“No,” she said aloud, trying to banish the images. “Anakin made his choices. He said that himself.” The words steadied her; it would be too easy to lay the blame solely on the Force.

“It influences us. Directly or indirectly, I can’t deny that. But our choices are our own.” The Force swirled around her, a familiar sensation overlaid now with new terror. “They have to be.” 

The feel of it intensified, pressing against her skin, whispering through her mind. For a moment, fear swept away rational thought; it was in the cargo hold with her. It was everywhere. Something too vast to comprehend, an unknowable presence tracking her as she paced. Did it smile, watching something so small try to puzzle out the universe? The thought choked her, a paralyzing horror that dwarfed anything else that had ever scared her— rhydonium, the roar of the _X’us’R’iia_ , a masked face in an interrogation chamber, blank and merciless. The memories seared through her, horror eating away at her like acid, and then the awful sense of watching eyes faded and died. 

The Force lay quiescent around her. Harmless. 

Rey gasped, sucking in great, ragged gulps of air as she fought to breathe normally. It was a long minute before her lungs stopped seizing. The sour aftertaste of fear coated her tongue like bile, burning and awful. She closed her eyes and forced herself to shove down the fear, deliberately recalling the singing beauty of the Force, the triumphant flow of power through her saberstaff. Powerful light, powerful dark. 

_I’m sick to death of these object lessons_ , she thought, half to herself and half to...Luke, probably. She wasn’t quite brave enough yet to sass the thing that just shredded her like a rancor’s snack. Somehow, the thought made her laugh. If she was right, if her desperation for answers wasn’t playing tricks on her, the last however many thousand years of history were nothing short of absurd. Anakin’s Jedi—Kenobi, Windu, _Yoda_ —held such a skewed perception of the Force they might as well have been in a different galaxy. Benevolent? Try eldritch. It was something out a bad holobook, the kind of story old spacers told in dingy bars to scare the cockiness out of young guns thinking of joining up. 

Absurd, but all too real.

Rey left the cargo hold at a measured pace, deliberately not running. She headed directly to her quarters, swapping the mug—surprisingly still intact—for the comforting weight of her saberstaff. She could chew over the details of choice and morality while she ran through katas. The Force was beautiful. She had to remember that. So much about it felt _right_ : the lovely, lethal arc of her saber in combat, the joy that bloomed in her when she stretched out a hand and cleared the way, the ache of the bond and the way it shimmered in her heart, bittersweet and beloved. 

She clung to the memories as she made her way to the cargo hold. A different cargo hold. Until she could shake the lingering terror, she’d keep her blade at hand and her mind busy.

 

—

 

The bond stayed shuttered.

She could tell it was intentional this time. The static was painfully constant, somehow more grating than it was before, as if he were willing the door to stay closed instead of trying to pry it back open. On some level, she understood: the Supreme Leader couldn’t be in love with a rebel. Kylo couldn’t keep bleeding out, couldn’t keep torturing himself with hope. Of course he’d locked everything down. 

Rey understood, but most of her still wanted to smash through and yell at him until he apologized. They were both so careful not to say goodbye, so careful not to ruin the memory of their time together, and now this? It was almost cowardly. Kylo was many things, but he’d never been afraid of pain. He courted it, hunted it, ran it down and bled for it and used it as fuel. It wasn’t healthy, not by a long shot; she should be glad he was finally trying to spare himself. Instead, she didn’t want to be his line in the sand, the thing that finally broke him.

She didn’t want to cause him pain at all. 

So she gritted her teeth and put up with the static, channelling her restless energy into sweeping drills with her lightsaber and distracting herself with the problem of the Force. She meditated until she felt like crawling out of her own skin, and then she paced in endless circuits around the _Falcon_ , twisting her brain into knots, trying to come up with a creed that could support a real balance without sacrificing ethics along the way. 

Through it all, the mosaic kept rising in her mind, a beacon she couldn’t quite work out how to reach. _The dream of the Jedi_ , Anakin’s voice said in her memory. The dream itself wasn’t flawed, as far as she could tell, but the execution was. Fear. Repression. Burying things in the dark, where they festered and grew and spawned monsters of their own. It couldn’t be like that again, but she understood where that impulse came from now— some of the Jedi must have felt that awful sentience, that same sense of watching eyes. Only instead of facing it, the ancient masters tried to smother it. 

The more she thought about it, the more inevitable it seemed. The strict separation of the two sides of the Force meant the system was inherently skewed; how could you do anything but cant toward the light if the opposite side of the Force was treated like a contagion? No. She was falling into the very trap she’d already identified. Light wasn’t good, dark wasn’t evil: it was just a spectrum of energy. But didn’t the trap itself prove the concepts were linked? A remnant of the Jedi or basic nature or some other reason entirely, the galaxy didn’t separate the concepts. Any creed she came up with would have to accommodate that. 

Stars, the answers were so close she could taste them. What else had Anakin said? Something about her already having all the pieces? The mosaic, Luke’s lessons, _everything is linked_ , moons in shattered orbits, hearts torn in opposite directions. Black and white, shadow and shine, gray mist curling around the tattered threads of the bond, a bruise as tender as a new beginning. Her own thoughts echoed back to her: mirrors and binaries, always, endlessly. 

Could it really be that simple?

For an agonizing stretch of heartbeats she didn’t dare breathe, afraid the idea would vanish like smoke in the wind. Instead, it solidified and gained shape, the bones of an old wreck emerging from the sand. What scavenger didn’t know what to do with old bones? Take what you can salvage and leave the rest to the desert. 

A fierce joy spread through her veins, almost vicious. 

_I can do this._

The saberstaff nearly clattered to the floor as she hurried to deactivate it, thoughts hammering at her like steelpeckers, mind itching with possibilities. 

_I can do this._

 

—

 

The days blurred together, streaming past her like starlines. She dreamed and worked and meditated, meditated and worked and dreamed. Pots of caf stayed on the warmer until they turned thick and bitter. She drank them anyway, ignoring the taste. Eventually, the whole ship smelled vaguely of burnt caf, but it kept her awake long enough to build something better from the wreckage of two failed Jedi Orders. She kept what worked—old rituals, partnered pairs, the quatrain unfolding like a hymn—and discarded what didn’t. Isolation and fear, secrets and repression; she let them burn away like dross.

At the end of it, she had shaky hands, a deep and abiding hatred of unsweetened caf, and a datapad full of answers. Cobbled together from theory and crude philosophy and more than a few wild guesses, it felt _right_ , the same way her saber did. Paired with a rough translation of the Jedi Code, it was the dream of the Jedi given one last chance. 

_Emotion, yet peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity. Chaos, yet harmony. Death, yet the Force._

It was a new translation, or perhaps a very old one. She’d seen glimpses of something similar in the moldering old texts, fragments of Aurebesh that the scholars dismissed as primitive and unrefined. A part of her wondered if it was the original Code, the creed her mosaic Jedi had adhered to. If so, that meant all her searching had led her right back to the source, a binary nested inside a trinity. 

“Third time’s a charm, I guess,” she said to herself as she pointed the _Falcon_ away from the major traffic lanes. “I hope.” All she could do now was put her work to the test. Taking a deep breath, Rey put it out of her mind. The Code would either work or it wouldn’t. She had something else to take care of, and for that she needed neutral ground. 

It was a long, routine flight. The First Order tracked Han Solo’s ship less avidly these days, but she was careful all the same, avoiding the busiest hyperlanes and skimming along the edges of forgotten trade routes. It was habit, caution for caution’s sake. She probably didn’t need to bother: Kylo’s men had bigger problems than one old freighter. After nearly three years of subterfuge and guerilla tactics, Leia’s network was finally working its magic out in the open. The General was causing enough of a stir that Rey slid the _Falcon_ into a quiet stretch of stars near Gorse without any trouble at all. 

One half in constant, burning sun and the other in perpetual night, the tidally-locked planet was striking, even beautiful, but also dangerously unstable. _An apt metaphor_ , she thought, exhaustion not enough to dampen the irony. Still, the night-dark forest was cool and damp, a welcome relief after being cooped up in the _Falcon_ for weeks on end. She let the Force guide her through a dense forest, far enough away from the settlements that only barest hint of light reached the trees. Setting down her pack, she settled at the base of a towering forest giant, impossibly tall for something that had grown in darkness. The bark was rough, and this close, faintly luminescent. Minutes slid by, and it was so tempting to close her eyes and sleep, but she kept them open. As her vision adjusted, the forest came alive, suffused with pale violet light. It was an ordinary sight on Gorse, but it seemed to Rey like something rare and precious, a gift from the universe after all her work. 

She breathed in the ghostly beauty, committing it to memory, then set aside her wonder and reached for the bond. 

A shuddery blast of static greeted her, itching through her blood, fiery and numbing in a way that reminded her of a city world. It got worse the longer she held onto the bond, the feel of it ratcheting up until she couldn’t stand it. She let go, and the pain bled away. 

“Alright,” she conceded, though there was no way he could hear her through the static, “you were more honest than I thought.” _I don’t know how to break through_.

There was no way to gauge whether this wall was stronger or weaker than the one he conjured accidentally. She hadn’t thought to test it then, too caught up in her own frustration try and parse how the mechanics of the bond worked. Even now, she wasn’t quite sure how they managed to reconnect. Her best guess was that the Force simply...wore away the wall on its own. It wanted Rey and Kylo to fix things, so it did its best to keep them in close proximity. 

She could wait for the Force to do the same with this new barrier, but there was no telling how long it would take. Longer than the first time, surely, since Kylo’s effort was deliberate now, not an accident of emotion. Maybe that was the key— emotion always made the bond flare, like tossing fuel on a fire. If she could dredge up something powerful enough to put a crack in the wall, chances were the Force would do the rest. 

It was easy enough to start. Ilum was close to her thoughts, broken fury and aching confusion shot through with static. The memories flowed like spice wine: the burn of betrayal, the warmth of his body, his voice rough on her name, like a plea, like a prayer. The images did nothing to dull the pain as she gripped the bond, pitting her will against the barrier between them, but it was easier to ignore with her focus turned inward. Champala, the soft gleam of stars and a whispered confession, tallgrass and regret on Lothal, the cool air of the _Absolution_ , the taste of his skin, the beat of his heart—

The barrier shattered.

In the brief moment of stillness that followed, she caught a glimpse of painful, stunned joy coursing through the bond like blood. Then Kylo tried to shutter the connection once more, and she acted without thought. She yanked, hard, and then he was there with her, a tall dark shape silhouetted against the faint light of the trees. 

She had so much to tell him it was hard to know where to begin. An apology floated faintly through her mind, drifting out into the bond. Kylo stayed silent, still reeling. 

“We didn’t say goodbye.” The Force be damned, it was all she could come up with. 

He flushed but didn’t apologize. “It seemed kinder that way.”

It took some of the sting away. Still, there was a part of her that wanted to smack him, roiling with frustration and hurt. She didn’t try to hide it, just let it simmer alongside the breathless reality of his presence. 

He read it all through the bond. “Rey,” he started. The sadness in his voice made her ache. “Why am I here?”

She patted the ground beside her. “It’s a long story. Sit with me for a while before I try to tell it.”

There was a long moment of hesitation and then he folded himself down next to her side, a bare inch away from touching. When she reached for his hand, he didn’t protest, merely tugged his gloves off and let her tangle their fingers together. They sat quietly for a long time, soaking in each other’s presence, bathed in the soft violet glow of the forest. It was strange sort of peace, fraught with longing, bittersweet. 

She was afraid the break the silence between, worried that he wouldn’t understand. Scared that he would. But the stars slid past them, slow and sure, and she could feel their interlude slipping away. 

“You asked me once if Anakin’s lightsaber was too broken to fix.” _If you were too broken to fix_. She understood that now. “Remember?”

His hand squeezed hers, trying to tighten into the fist she’d seen him make so many times, a failed attempt to strangle his shame. 

“I remember.”

“You’re not wreckage.” He startled, but she kept going. “You’re a person.”

“That’s not—”

“Just listen. You’re a person. Whatever the Force wills or doesn’t will, you’re the only one who can take that away from yourself.”

_Please understand._

He turned away from her, staring into the darkness for a long moment. When he met her gaze again, his expression was bleak. 

“It’s inevitable, Rey. I know enough family history to grasp that.”

The altar, the helmet, the crushing weight of the Force burning through him. Every atrocity he ever committed for Snoke, each sick, fleeting moment of relief those acts brought him. Simple grass huts going up in flames, the Knights of Ren bleeding out in the dust of some unnamed planet, slaughter upon slaughter. Rey saw all of it as it he dredged it up and laid it bare before her. 

“I can’t undo any of that.” His voice was a rasp, the same grating harshness that first greeted her in the desert. The ghost of a ghost, haunting him even now. 

Bile rose in her throat, but she swallowed it down. 

“That’s just it, though. The Force can push at us, beat us down, scream and scream and scream, but our choices are our own. That’s why we’re in this mess.” She brought her other hand up to rest over his heart. “But that’s how we’ll get out of it, too.”

“Rey—”

“The Force is energy. You can feel it, can’t you? It’s so vast. Good, evil are just— they’re words on the wind. They don’t matter to the Force. Touch the dark if you have to. Draw on it.”

“It’s not that simple,” he interrupted, frustration edging out that hopeless rasp.

“It is! It is that simple. Force-users were always meant to reflect the balance of the Force. It was never light or dark that defined them. It all comes down to choice.” She climbed into his lap, ignoring the way they both shivered, and cupped his face between her palms. “You still have choices, Kylo. Please believe that.”

He stared back at her, silent. In the darkness of the forest, she couldn’t see the gold in his eyes.

“Not ‘Ben’?”

“You are who you are, whatever name you wear.” 

He choked down something that sounded like a sob. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

She closed her eyes, pressing her forehead to his. His arms came around, desperate and tight, crushing her awkwardly to his chest. One breath, two, three. Rey memorized every detail: the scent of wild dark spice, the rhythm of his heart, the feel of scar and skin. The helpless love writ large in every atom, every breath. Whatever happened, she would have this memory. 

She could have lived inside the moment forever. Instead, she pulled away, disentangling herself with brisk motions. 

“Make your choices,” she told him, her own voice hoarse now.

They didn’t say goodbye. It was difficult, but she had practice with that. Harder by far was holding back the other phrase that wanted to echo across the bond, words that would burrow into his heart like they’d burrowed into hers, agonizing and truer than true. But she wouldn’t betray him like that; he had to choose for himself, not for anyone else. 

_I love you, I love you, I love you—_

She couldn’t give him that, but she could give him something else. “You’re not alone,” she said, the words heavy with memory. “Even if you can’t feel me, even if you can’t see me, I’m here.” The bond flooded with emotion, a caustic mix of hope and despair. “That won’t change.”

_Rey._

Just her name, like a question, like an answer. Like a vow, and then he was gone. 

The night grew abruptly cold as the last traces of his body heat faded. She wrapped her arms around herself, trying not to shiver. 

The static was back. 

She wanted to cry, but she didn’t. She sat for a long time, chill seeping into her bones, waiting for a dawn she’d forgotten wasn’t coming. When she did remember, she coaxed her stiff muscles into motion and headed back toward the stars.

 

—

 

Back on the _Falcon_ , Rey sat in the cockpit and listened to the three droid brains bickering about the best route back to Leia. The hyperdrive hummed at the back of the ship, smooth and strong as Corellian whiskey. She plugged in coordinates, half from the droids and half from her own instinctive sense of astrogation. She still didn’t understand how it worked, but it didn’t bother her anymore. She put the ship in gear and punched it.

Fragments of a dream circled like moons through her thoughts: his mouth on her skin, peace like a still spot in a raging river, rough bark and faint light. Features cast in darkness and starlight. In the dream, she found the right words. _“You’re not a wreck, but even if you were, I’m a scavenger. I specialize in wreckage,”_ and _“There’s nothing left to destroy. Come back and build something with me. Come home.”_ And layered through it all, the words she’d had all along: _“Love you I love you I love—”_

A gauge ticked over on the instrument panel, a faint ping going off to let her know she’d reached cruising speed. She swiped a hand across her eyes, shaking off the dust of the dream. Starlines burned around her, a searing blue-black canvas outside the transparisteel canopy as the _Falcon_ roared through the hyperlanes, taking her home to Leia, to Finn and Poe and Chewie. It would be good to see them again. She felt each star as it flew past, each planet, every desolate moon. 

Somewhere, Kylo was surrounded by different stars. Maybe he was staring out at them, alone in the corridors of the _Absolution_. Maybe someday, they could share the same stars again. 

Rey folded the thought away, tucked it next to the memory of a night-violet forest. The Force swirled around her, prickling like a long-broken bone finally starting to heal. 

Right now, she had a war to win.

 

—

 

_Someday:_

 

Ben Solo’s heart was green and startlingly alive. 

Chandrila, maybe? It didn’t quite match his descriptions. Naboo? That was where his grandmother was from, she remembered. No. Padmé’s homeworld was green, but not like this. Less forest, more open plains. Swamps, too. 

Wherever she was, it was beautiful. Tall trees, so massive she could barely make out the shadow of their canopies against the deep velvet of the evening sky. Small furred creatures rustled in the brush and birds chattered away, high clear calls that echoed endlessly through the trees. The air was soft, just the barest hint of a breeze. 

No raging wind. No ghosts. Just Kylo, stepping forward to meet her where the forest thinned and gave way to desert. It was a familiar landscape made new: nightbloomers unfurled as the evening bled into night, their heady perfume turning the air sweet. Skittermice hunted for seeds, the bravest of them venturing into patches of spinebarrels, careful of the thorns but determined nonetheless. The sand was a raw wound turning to scar: painful still, but healing. 

There was a ship in the sky above them, a fast moving point of light. The engines were a distant roar, faint at first, growing louder as it came in to land. She knew without looking that it was the _Falcon_. 

Kylo smiled and stretched out a hand. Emotion welled in her heart, stealing her breath. Rey blinked away tears, hungry for the sight of him, whole and here. The smile turned into a grin, something sly and secret and bursting with joy, and he stole the words right out of her heart as she put her hand in his. 

_Welcome home._


	2. Author's Note

Less a separate chapter and more a way to let people know that the fic—intended to be read as a one-shot—is now finally posted in full. I couldn't get it all posted at once thanks to some very unexpected health issues, but my latent perfectionist tendencies wouldn't let me post it as a 4k prologue with a 38k chaser. So, a (massive) update to the original post seemed like the best way to go about it. 

Apologies to anyone looking for an actual second chapter!

**Author's Note:**

> [sprints in three hours late with coffee all over my shirt]: I’VE GOT THIS
> 
> thank you so much for your patience, NextToSomething— here is the full fic! i went with perks/challenges of a force bond connection, because after the final scenes in tlj and these _nerds_ and their stupid _faces_ , how could i not? i had a blast writing the fic (even with the unexpected health issues dogging me), and i hope it’s something you can enjoy as well :) 
> 
> apologies for my complete inability to censor my mechanical ridiculousness. i just love the _falcon_? and ships in general? oops. (the _absolution_ is ~technically canon if you squint!) 
> 
> title from audra mae’s gorgeous cover of “forever young”
> 
> speaking of music, [jacyevans](http://www.jacyevans.tumblr.com/) was a lifesaver and a delight and a much-needed, very patient support system who made a gorgeously atmospheric playlist for this fic! check it out [here](https://open.spotify.com/user/jacyevans/playlist/5HlciZdkOkxkthzJS978VM?si=gsYD6qbaRnum0I_EsccG4A%22) if you want to up the angst quotient by at least 15%
> 
> finally, massive thanks to [neuxue](http://www.neuxue.tumblr.com) for her help as a beta-reader, cheerleader, and formatting wizard. without her help, this fic absolutely would not exist. special kudos and also a crystal fox for the excellent geology/science/astrophysics advice, including but not limited to “lunar collision, but make it fashion,” because lia is the best/worst
> 
> ok wait i lied, one last thing: this mess is rebloggable [on tumblr](http://www.redbelles.tumblr.com/post/177562581168/fic-build-a-ladder-to-the-stars) if that's your jam. thanks for reading!


End file.
